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DUKE 
UNIVERSITY 


DIVINITY SCHOOL 
LIBRARY 


MISSIONS IN STATE AND CHURCH 


BY THE SAME AUTHOR 


POSITIVE PREACHING AND THE MODERN 
MIND. 7s. 6d. net. 


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CHRIST. Is. 6d. 


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Lonpon : HODDER AND STOUGHTON 


MISSIONS IN STATE 
AND CHURCH 


SERMONS AND ADDRESSES 


BY 


P. T. FORSYTH,’ M.A;, D.D. 


PRINCIPAL OF HACKNEY COLLEGE 
HAMPSTEAD 


NEW YORK 
A. C. ARMSTRONG AND SON 
3 & 5 WEST EIGHTEENTH ST 
1908 


I SHOULD LIKE TO INSCRIBE THIS BOOK IN 
AFFECTION AND HONOUR TO A TRUE 
MISSIONARY STATESMAN 


REV. RALPH WARDLAW THOMPSON, D.D. 


NOW FOR TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS 
FOREIGN SECRETARY OF THE LONDON MISSIONARY 
SOCIETY, AND THIS YEAR CHAIRMAN 
OF THE 


CONGREGATIONAL UNION OF ENGLAND AND WALES 


49199'9 


CONTENTS 


I 


PAGE 


THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH ; : is 1 
II 

FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION . : . 49 
III 

SOME CAUSES OF MISSIONARY APATHY : 3/005 
IV 

SOME GROUNDS OF MISSIONARY ZEAL . ; 131 
Vv 

THE NATIONAL ASPECT OF MISSIONS ; 5 165 
vii 


491897 


Viii CONTENTS 


VI 

PAGE 

THE EXCLUSIVENESS OF CHRIST f : . 195 
VII 

THE MISSIONARY’S STAYING POWER 7 i 219 
VIII 


THE GREATEST CREDITORS THE GREATEST DEBTORS 247 


Ix 


A MISSIONARY MODEL . . i : 275 


HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE : ; 289 


y 


THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 


Missions 2 


“Now is the judgment of this ie: 
of this world be cast out. 


unto Me.”—Joun xi. i. ol, 32. 


THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH * 


ERTAIN Greeks wished to see Jesus, and 
they applied for help to the Greek-named 
apostles. There does not seem to have been an 
interview in their mind. They were proselytes 
to Judaism on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Jesus 
had just made His royal entry, and He was 
the talk of the town. They would not miss 
one of the great sights of their journey. Visit . 
Jerusalem as proselytes, and not see the last 
sensation, the possible Messiah! As soon would 
an English pervert go to Rome, and not see 
the Pope. 

When Jesus was told, it produced a singular 
effect upon Him. It was a small matter ap- 
parently; but things affect us as they find us; 
and this fell on a soul in great tension and 


* Preached at the City Temple on behalf of the London 
Missionary Society. 
3 


4 THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 


vision. Heathen, then, were curious about the 
Messiah of the Jews! Was He gratified by 
the attention of a new world, as a British 
preacher might be with an American public? 
No, it seemed to Him like a straw on the wind 
of the Spirit. It was like the weeds Columbus 
met at sea. It was the beginning of a new 
world. These men were the harbingers of a 
new time. Here were the swallows, spring was 
at the door, and summer on the way. 

But the worst storm of the winter was still to 
come. It meant death. It meant His cross. 

Jesus had always felt that His earthly 
mission was to the Jews. His ointment was 
held for the time in that small alabaster-box. . 
But you remember how the universal scope of 
His work was borne in upon Him in contact 
with the Syrophenician woman. And at the 
same time He was forced by the attitude of 
the Jews to face an early death. The two 


B BS J ee od 
convictions, universality and_death, were one. 
ae x ee ee 


vig. AS 
There was but one way for His work to become 
universal. To fill the world with the healing 
odour, the box must be broken. The emancipa- 
tion of His gospel must come by His death. 
Already He had seen death to be itnevwitable 
from without, from the temper of His foes. He 


could not escape it. Now it is carried home to 


THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 5 


Him, how necessary | it: was from within, from 
His His Father. He must not escape it. “His work 
Serdined tt it. It was in God’s will. The will of 
the Pharisees becomes to Him, by a sure mys- 
tery and miracle, the will of God. Both willed 
His death. But how different the intention! 
What He realised from the Syrophenician now 
comes home anew, but with tragedy and glory. 
So when the disciples thought to gratify Him 
by the news of His popularity, His reply was 
mixed, and it was disconcerting. He was elated, 
indeed, for a moment. “The hour is come 
for the Son of Man to be glorified.” Ah, at 
last! they thought. But the only way to such 
. glory filled Him with melancholy. “Except a 
corn of wheat die.” What! harping on death at 
such atime! They did not understand it. But 
He was often careless whether they understood 
or not. We are much too lucid for His great- 
ness. He was not now teaching, but soliloquising. 
The agony struck home to Him. Gethsemane 
had begun. The temptation was resumed. He 
saw the kingdoms of the world, and the glory 
of them. It was not thei eir pagan splendour, but 
the glory they m might yield “to God; if Messiah 
put out His latent powers and became ¢ their | 
literal King. He flushed to anticipate the scene. 
He saw His own Puritan race keen for a lead. 


6 THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 


He saw empire wide open to such powers as His, 
where He might serve God on a royal scale, and 
make Him an offering of a conquered world. 
Yet He saw just as surely that for Him that 
way was barred. Swift and universal empire, 
even if beneficent, could be neither Divine nor 
final. It fitted neither the true God nor the real 
world, neither grace nor need. And it was too 
vulgar for His soul. His vast powers were to be 
called in at a moral bidding. They were to be 
fixed on a task not only obscure, but bewilder- 
ing, unpopular, and apparently futile. His star 
rose, only to be smothered by the black cloud 
of death. His joy suddenly sweeps round to 
sorrow. A world was before Him, His foot was 
on the frontier—and He must turn away to die. 
How like was the Moses of the new Israel to 
the Moses of the old! It was bitter. If a man 
make his fortune just to find he has heart 
disease and cannot last a twelvemonth it is 
bitter enough. And life is full of such fates. 
But these are minor bitternesses compared to 
the misery that the prospect of death brought 
to Him who was the fulness of life and power 
for good. And even that, again, was small and 
personal compared to another grief. It was the 
grief of knowing that His duty would bring not 
only trouble but perdition to the Israel He loved. 


THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH a 


His death must be the damnation of the race 
He could have imperialised. It was not the 
darkness of death, but the damnation in it that 
struck through Him, and turned his sadness to 
His passion. It is agony for a man to do 
for conscience what he knows may ruin his 
family. How much more when he has to do 
what will condemn them, what will bring out 
all the evil in them and be death unto death 
to them; what will drive them to blaspheme 
the Holy Ghost, call His sacrifice a mere craze 
and His mission lunacy—yea, to protect them- 
selves by putting Him away? That, you will 
remember, was what Christ's own family 
thought when He took up His work. They 
went out to bring Him back as mad, and put 
Him under restraint. And it was what His 
whole nation were coming to think also. And 
so, when an occasion, however trivial, bore this 
swiftly and sharply in on Him, it was almost 
more than He could bear. That was the case 
now: “How is My soul troubled! Father, 
spare Me this hour.” And the Father would 
not. Jesus well-nigh lost heart at the revived 
sense of His tragic doom, of involving in 
calamity all He loved. So He did once before, 
when He saw the awful result of His work 
in family estrangement and the breaking up 


8 THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 


of homes. “It is dreadful,” He said. “I have 
a baptism to be baptized with; and how am 
I crushed until it be over!” (Luke xii. 50.) 
But the attack only called out the resources 
of His solemn will. He ‘stood still and silent. 
The passion had begun. He was conquering 
His distress by prayer. Healways did. Beware 
of soliloquy (you poor Hamlets of an unhinged 
age!) if it do not turn to prayer. He recovered 
His spiritual self-command, which was His habi- 
tual obedience to the purpose of God. And He 
not only regained calm; He rose to exaltation 
again. Calm will not meet depression. Depres- 
sion is in the nature of a passion with such souls 
as His, and it must be expelled by a counter- 
passion of faith and action. He rose to the 
eternal, glorious issue before Him. “I die alone. 
But unless I die I am more alone. If I die I 
bear much fruit.” The prize was the world, the 
enemy the prince of this world; the work was 
judgment; the conflict the decisive battle of © 
the immortal sinful soul; the pressure was the 
Father’s will. So from the anguish of “ Now is 
My soul troubled. What shall I say? Father, 
save Me from this hour,” He swept upward in 
spirit to the Father’s side. There only had He 
true vision of the kingdom of the world and 
its glory. There the end is clear from the 


> 


THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 9 


beginning. “But for this cause came I unto 
this hour. Father, glorify Thy Name.” And as 
a peal of thunder broke near it coincided for 
Him on His holy height with the inward voice 
of God. “Now is the judgment of this world. 
Now shall the prince of this world be cast out 
[of the earth]. And I, if I be raised from the 
earth, shall draw all men unto Me.” He meant 
His departure to the Father by death, and not 
the specific miracle of His resurrection or His 
ascension. 

And the great words, seen by John in the light 
of long years after, seemed to him to carry a 
side reference so full of Divine irony that he 
could not refrain from alluding to it. The 
double sense of the word “lifted up” suggested 
to John a solemn irony of contrast between 
the eternal exaltation of heaven (which Christ 
meant) and the shameful elevation of a few 
feet from earth on the cross. And he notes the 
suggestion as he goes by. “The Lord’s words 
had in them the note of death and even a hint 
of crucifixion.” Christ is cast by the Jews out 
of life, raised above the ground on the cross, 
above all the world in the spirit. But in the 
act, by the greatest irony in history, He casts 
Satan out of the world. Adjudged to death He 
judges to death the power which slew Him. 


10 THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 


And while Satan is cast out from men and 
from his throne, the outcast Christ is set on 
His throne, strong enough to draw all men 
away from Satan after Him. 

Our modern experience is against a personal 
Satan. But Christ’s was the other way. And 
if we must choose here between Christ and the 


_ modern mind, surely He who really redeemed 
| from evil must know whether the reality He 
_ fought was chiefly a principle or a person. 
_ But that by the way. 


It was the Cross that catholicised Christ, and 
eternalised Him. It rent the husk of Israel 
which bound His incarnate life. It broke the 
pot in which the tree of life was nursed, and 
transplanted it to the open air and the whole 
earth. The Cross is the point at which history 
is made an integral part of eternity. 

Christ must die to come really near mankind. 
The greatest power on life acts from the realm 
of the dead. ‘More and more we are ruled by 
the dead,” says Comte. You have the same 
thought in John xvi., “I will see you again, 
for I go to My Father.” And it is in the mys- 
terious words, “Touch Me not, for I am not yet 
ascended.” The real intimacy of contact was 
possible only under spiritual conditions. 

The stamp of universality in Christ's religion, 


THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH Il 


then, lies not chiefly in His teaching. That was 
for the lost sheep of Israel, and much of it for 
the hour only. It lies in His work more than 
in His word. He was a man of action more 
than of speech; He said little of what He did 
most. Most martyrs have little to say. His 
word lies in His healing more than His teaching. 
It lies in the Cross, which continued His healing 
rather than His speaking, and which crowned 
His deeds rather than His truths. There is more 
of the cross that He came for in His cures than 
in His doctrine. The Cross was not central to 
Christ’s teaching as the kingdom was; but it 
was central to what is more than His teaching 
—to His healing, to His Person, work, and 
victory. It is more original than His teaching, 
and more universal. It is by the Cross that He 
chiefly reaches the world. What goes deepest 
to the soul goes farthest with the world. And 
Christianity spread, not as_a religion of truth, 
but of power, help, healing, resurrection, re- 
demption. ~ Harnack’s missionary history of 
the first Church has just made that clear. It 
was not the teaching of Jesus that made and 
spread it, but the gospel of the Christ. It was, 
says Harnack, these four powers—the one living 
God, Christ as Saviour and Judge, the Resurrec- 
tion, and the godly discipline of the Church. 


12 THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 


The great and real charter of missions, there- 
fore, lies not in any express command of Christ. 
They would be just as binding on us if the 
command at the close of Matthew’s Gospel had 
dropped off with the last page of the first 
manuscript. They would arise, as they did for 
Paul, not out of any injunction, but out of the 


, nature of Christ's Person, and especially from 


His Cross, His resurrection, and His exalted 
life, judgment, and reign. If they had not been 
commanded by Christ they would have been 
invented by His Holy Spirit. “It pleased God 
to reveal His Son in me [as the risen Crucified], 
that I might preach Him among the Gentiles.” 
The imperative of missions is rather in the 
gospel than in the Gospels, in the urgency of 
the risen Christ than in the precept of the 
Christ on earth. They are a dispensation of the 
Spirit. So entirely are missions supernatural in _ 


‘their nature that they must rise and fall with _ 


our faith in the supernatural, with the reality 
of the Cross to us, and of the resurrection, and 
of our relations with the living Christ. Our 
missions will escape from chronic difficulties 
when our Church recovers the ruling note of 
the redeeming Cross and the accent of the 
Holy Ghost. 

But this passage of my text is an utterance of 


THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 13 


Christ in which the Cross and its missionary 
energy are central. You will note that verses, 
31, 32 go together to complete Christ’s thought of | 
His universal victory, and its condition. That ' 
victory lies in the Cross, and in the Cross in two 
aspects: (1) As the real exaltation of Christ, as 
His real victory. That victory was not gained 
in the Resurrection, but only avouched by God 
there. It was in the Cross that Christ con- 
quered. It was there that Christianity was set 
up. The Church was founded there. The 
Resurrection and Pentecost started the Church, 
but it was the Cross that founded it. Its history 
begins with the Resurrection, but its life begins 
with the Cross. The Cross did what the Resur- 
rection published. (2) As the judgment of the 
world-power. I would develop these thoughts. 


II 


The Cross meant not only death, but a 
judgment-death. Christ’s death is at the root 
of our missions, not only as a sacrificial death, 
but as a judgment-death. The Lord Himself so 
regards it. His drawing of the world lay close 
in His thought to His judgment on the prince 
and power of the world. The holiness of Christ 
was the one thing damnatory to the Satanic 


tees 


pent Wee atts B The VV CoA te ty” te de 
14. THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 


Ae A q™ ud prt Can re A “} > Aa 


power. And it was His death which cc consum- 
mated that holiness. “It was His death, ‘there- 
fore, that was Satan’ s fatal doom. It was not 
His dying that saved, but the holiness of it. In 
the Cross took place the holy judgment which 
made Christ sin’s destroyer and the spiritual 
Master of the universe. His exorcism of Satan 
was in the same act His conquest of man. 
“Now is the judgment of this world,’ He said 
Himself. And what we call the last judgment 
is only the completion of the deadly judgment 
passed on collective evil in the Cross. The 
greatest judgment that God ever sent on a 
wicked world was no mere catastrophe ; it was 
Christ, and His Cross, and His salvation. For 
our deserts God gave us—Christ. What was 
done in the Cross is a greater thing than the 
last judgment itself can be, however sublimely 
you conceive it. For the last judgment is some- 
thing done in Humanity or on it; but the Cross 
was something done in the soul of Christ. And 
great as Humanity is, the soul of Christ is 


greater still. 

Our missionary salvation rests in this 
judgment and destruction of sin already done. 
“In the paradox of the Saviour-Judge,” says 
Harnack, “ Christianity possesses one of its most 
characteristic ideas, and one which gave it a 


THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 15 


special superiority over other religions.” And if | 
Christ crucified judge the world, it means that 
the world is adjudged to Christ. The great 
missionary motive is the faith that in the Cross 
the world has been adjudged in reversion to 
Christ. You cannot separate the missionary 
idea, the saving idea, from the idea of Christ’s 
judgment and Christ’s right. 

But what we can do is this; we can separate 
the missionary idea from an excessive depen- 
dence on future judgment. Its real root is 
here, that the prince of this world has been 
judged. The missionary history of the Church 
is Christ’s slow entrance on the right which He 
set up once for all in His Cross. 

It is sometimes said that it was the awful 
sense of the last judgment that was the main- 
spring of missions a hundred years ago; that 
they arose from the passion to save the heathen 
from hell. It is said that their inspiration was 
eschatological, and we are now ethical; and 
hence that the decay of belief in a sure hell 
for the unevangelised heathen must lead to a 
decay in missionary zeal. And no doubt this 
belief did play a great part in the missionary | 
zeal of that time, as it did with the first Church. 
But the principle was not essentially wrong. 
The connection between the judgment idea and 


16 THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 


the missionary idea is a real one. The judgment 
at the end of history is only the corollary of the 
judgment at the centre of history, and the close 
of that daily judgment in which we live. It is the 
sequel of the Cross, where the soul of evil was 
judged and cast out by the soul of Christ. The 
mainspring of missions is not the judgment that 
will fall, but the judgment that has fallen in the 
Cross. It is not pity but faith, not so much pity 
for perishing heathen, but faith and zeal for 
Christ’s crown rights set up for ever in the deed 
decisive for all the world. This is steadier than 
our views of the future, and it will carry our 
missions better. Oh! my heart bleeds often 
with pity of poor men, women, children, and 
cattle. But I wish it moved as freely to Christ, 
and swelled with the faith and love of Him, 
with the joy and strength of His victory, the cer- 
tainty of His sure control. I sink under what 
has to be done for the world, till I realise that 
it is all less than what has been done and put 
into the charge of our faith and word. The 
\ world’s awful need is less than Christ’s awful 
‘ victory. And the devils we meet were all fore- 
damned in the Satan He ruined. The wicked- 
ness of the world is, after all, “a bull ‘in a net,” ‘3 
a chained beast kicking himself to death. Our | 
creed is right, but our practical religion is not so 


THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 17 


right. We do hold that Christ vanquished evil. 
But the weakness of much current work and | 
preaching is that it betrays more sense of what C 
has yet to be done than of what has been done. 
We feel man’s need more than Christ's fulness. 
We speak as men to whom the burden of re- 
formation is a closer reality than the faith 
of redemption. And many of the apostles of 
forward movements do not impress me as 
basing social reform on the evangelical passion, 
which they seem to treat with contempt, silent — 
or sharp. They lose the soul in serving Christ, 
like Martha. They do what Maeterlinck dreads: 
they give the lighthouse oil away to the 
neighbours. 

Christ has judged the prince of the world 
and doomed its principle. He did so by taking 
on Himself the judgment of the world. He 
brought forth judgment unto victory. He 
converted penalty, by holiness, into triumph. 
He took sin, was made sin, and He made it 
righteousness. Satan is cursed for ever by 
the curse Christ bore. He broke a universal 
curse into a universal blessing, And what 
He did, He did once for ever and for all. His 
religion is absolute and final. Yet it does not 
damn other religions, but only the evil and the 
‘inadequacy in them. It interprets them, trans- 
Missions 3 


18 THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 


figures them, gives them to themselves. It 
judges them into their true place. It criticises 
them in the sense of “appreciating” them. It 
does not denounce them. It does not say that 
all religious founders outside Him are thieves 
and robbers. I do not believe Christ ever said 
that. What Christ did was to immortalise the 
good, and ban the evil, and paralyse Satanic 
power. And He did it by active holiness. What 
He won was God’s moral victory in sinful man. 
It was a victory of conscience; and conscience 
is the most universal thing, the most missionary 


_ thing, of all. It is what makes man man, and 


‘makes him one, and makes him eternal. The 


conscience that redeems the conscience has the 
reversion of all mankind. It is not kind pity 
nor free thought that missions the world, but 
redeemed conscience. Look at the Old Tes- 
tament prophets. It was the mighty moral 
element in their idea of a holy God and Saviour 
that forced them out of a narrow Israel into 
a universal faith. So it was Christ's holy death 
that catholicised His life. What goes deepest 
to the conscience goes widest to the world. 
The more completely we feel sin to be con- 
demned in the Cross the more power and 
commandment we have to carry the absolution 


_ to the ends of the earth, The more the gospel 


THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 19 


is moralised, and the more ethical the Atone- 
ment is made, so much the more promise it 
'has for missions. 

I do not for a moment say that we must 
always go straight to the heathen, at home 
or abroad, and assail them with these truths. 
They are the deep motive of the Church rather 
than the first method of the missionary. The 
gospel of forgiveness is now the Church’s 
central word, and it is the mainspring of its 
aggressive work. The Church can only be 
missionary as it is remissionary. But this is 
not necessarily its first word, either with the 
heathen or with the young. The real meaning 
of it is often (and perhaps mostly) unfelt till 
there is some progress in the Christian life. 
Harnack says that the preaching of forgiveness 
in the deep, evangelical sense was not so 
prominent in the first spread of the Church 
as some of the other Christian powers he names. 
To the Church itself it did not come home till 
the Reformation. But now it has come home, 
and it must always be the mainspring of 
missions, as it is the marrow of the gospel. You 
may always measure the value to yourselves 
of Christ’s Cross by your interest in missions. 
And it is a safe test of the Spirit’s presence 
in a Church. They are of the essence of an 


20 THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 


apostolic Church as distinct from a Church of 
culture, or a school of thought, or a social club. 


Truths like grace, atonement, judgnfent, and 
redemption, may be strange or remote to the 


individual; because faith often lives with the 
way of past generations of faith upon it. But 
for the Church these truths are necessary, for its 
ministers central, and for its missions vital. They 
may not be the missionary’s stock-in-trade which 
he sets out as soon as he lands, but they are 
always his capital and his inspiration. Missions 
are so hard that they draw on the Church’s last 
reserves. And the missionary needs all his 
faith of God’s patience with himself to enable 
him to hope on for the heathendom to which 
he settles down when the novelty is by. 


iu Ill 


But Christ’s death was not only an act of 
judgment, but an act of sacrifice both to God 
and to man. There should be no doubt that the 
first thing in Christ's mind was always His 
action on God, His sacrifice to Him, His obe- 
dience to God’s will, and His answer to His love. 
And this is the first charge upon the Church 
which Christ’s sacrifice founded. Its function is 


we esos 


access to God before service to man. “Ye are 


THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 21 


bought with a price; be not ye the servants of 
men” (1 Cor. vii. 23). ‘The main function of the 
New Testament Church is approach to God,” 
says Dr. Lindsay. The service of man is but one 
of the forms in which the Church offers itself 
to God. The Church is first a priest to God 
and then a blessing to men. The popular idea 
of the Church, the journalist’s idea, is quite 
wrong. It regards it as an instrument for 
social service, with no more sacrifice, worship, 
or thought than contributes to that end. This 
is an idea of the Church which is inevitable 
wherever faith has ceased to find its object 
in the atonement Christ made to God, and 


is transferred to the pity Christ spent on / 


men. 

But though that be so, when Christ speaks 
here of the way He draws men, He is speaking 
of the effect of His sacrifice on them and their 
affairs. He speaks of His service of man as 
perpetual even in heaven. But it is still sacri- 
ficial. He is active in heaven with God, in a 
priesthood of self-oblation, which is service, 
blessing, and intercession. He works on men 
by working for them still, in love, pity, help, 
sacrifice, and the moving Cross. “Christ is 
crucified to the world’s end.” His great sacrifice 
to God is always prolonged as heavenly service 


22 THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 


to man. What He won by sacrifice He keeps 
by it. The Cross leads the generations on. 
He knew that, however it might be with a 
Satan, man would yield only to a spell, and 
,not to a rod. Salvation and coercion will not 
go together. If it is your duty to coerce, 
you must leave to others the task of saving. 
The employer cannot evangelise his workmen. 
Church and State can only prosper apart. It 
is one of the banes of our missionary enterprise 
that it comes to the heathen from a dominant 
militant race. And it has been the curse of 
Catholic missions, in Central America for 
instance, that they were carried on by a 
Church, not only militant, but military. That 
is what neutralises the self-sacrifice even of 
Jesuits. The Cross was not only His message, 
it was His method. Oh! why does our method 
not oftener preach our message? His way was 
the way of service, not dominion; of sympathy, 
not suppression; of healing, not harrying; of 
atonement, and not exaction; of affinity, not 
of Empire. 

These are the methods of Islam. And— 


“The moon of Mahomet 
Hath risen, and it will set; 
While, blazoned still on Heaven’s immortal noon, 
The Cross shall lead the generations on.” 


THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 23 


But, strictly, it is not the Cross that leads 
after all. That may mean but the method of 
Jesus. It needs His secret. And His secret is 
Himself. It is the Christ who was exalted by } 
the Cross. It is the living Lord, whose sacrifice 
is eternal, whose blessing is continual, and His 
intercession never fails. ‘“ Exalted, I will draw 
all men unto Me.” 

Mr. Booth says of the Congregationalists 
that their tendency is to interpret the belief in 
Christ simply as “Christian humanitarianism,” 
“not primarily as that which involves faith in 
the great sacrifice of a risen Saviour, but 
rather as the acceptance of an ideal affecting 
human life and human relationships.” Well, if 
that become our ruling note our missionary 
passion is doomed. But is it so? Take Mr. 
Booth cautiously. His idea of worship seems 
to be the Catholic. He will hardly call our 
tabernacles houses of God; and his idea of 
the gospel is not missionary, but social. He 
sets little store by conversion compared with |— 
social reform. He observes well, but divines 
little. And he omits our faith in the living, 
indwelling Christ. We may have slackened in 
our grasp of the atoning Christ, but we have 
not, or not yet, in our faith of the living Christ. 

It is a living Christ with whom we have to 


24 THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 


do. What flows from Him is not a mere old 
influence; it is not a mere fascination; it is 
not a humanitarian ideal, it is the Holy Spirit 
whom He sends. The spell that draws us to 
Christ is not the attraction of a fine spectacle 
or the glamour of a rare idea; it is the result 
of His own unseen action, the same yesterday, 
to-day, and for ever; actual, valid, creative in 
our souls. He does not simply charm men by 
the noble pathos of His grievous death into 
the worship of a Divine sorrow. He recreates 
men by the power of an atoning death, eter- 
nalised in His risen life. When He said He 
would draw all men to Him, do you think He 
was only predicting how great His influence 
would become? Was He only prophesying 
that He would light such a candle as could 
‘ never be put out? There is a foresight that 
lights up the vision of the-dying. Did that 
tell Him how engaging His memory and death 
would be, how great the beauty of His pity 
and His woe? Was that all? Was He only 
saying that His would rank among the great 
purifying tragedies of the race, which move 
men as they sit upon the ground and tell sad 
stories of the death of kings? Nay, He was 
doing more than predicting what would happen. 
He was promising what He would do, pro- 


THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 25 


mising His active interest and renewing Spirit. 
Was it only His fate that was to draw men, 
or was it His immortal energy and personal 
concern? Is His gospel His echo or is it His 
word ? Surely it is purpose, and not prophecy, 
we we have here—a promise of what He would do, 
and not merely a forecast of what men would 
feel. Christianity is not the worship of a , 
remote beauty, a mighty memory, or statuesque 
ideal; it is our standing answer to One who 
ever liveth to make intercession for us. 

If the aggressive and missionary power of 
Christianity lay simply in Christ’s ideal, or His 
engaging charm, or the pathos of His fate, 
then the best missionaries would be those 
men of genius and culture whose first quality 
was spiritual taste rather than vital faith ; men / 
who had the talent to depict spiritual beauty 
rather than the sacramental power of help, 
healing, and wyital redemption. The gospel 
word would then be a fine statement, not a 
sacrament; poetry, perhaps, but not power 
for life. But preaching which ceases to be 
sacramental ceases to live, and it leaves men 
victims to material sacraments and unholy 
priests. The proselytiser then takes the place 
of the missionary, and the Church stands where 
the gospel ought to be. But the saving sacra- 


26 THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 


ment is the sacrament of the Word and of the 
living faith it stirs. And the gospel word 
ceases to be sacramental if the Cross cease to 
be sacerdotal, if it be tragic and no more, if 
it be martyrdom and not atonement. It is 
the word of a constant sacrificial work. It 
creates'a priestly Church as the body of the 
great High Priest. It stirs a faith which bears 
the world’s sin on its heart in holy union 
with Christ. It prays for the whole world 
because it shares in His perpetual intercession 
for the world, and it preaches and toils because 
it shares His perpetual blessing of it, and His 
perpetual gift to it of Himself and His death- 
made life. It is that faith that spreads the 
Church; not humanitarianism, not ideal-wor- 
ship, not a taste for sanctity, but the priestly 
life of a priestly Church in a priestly Lord. 
The only time Paul calls himself a priest is in 
describing his missionary work (Rom. xv. 16): 
“TI am a ministering priest of Jesus Christ. 
I minister as a priest His gospel, and the 
offering I make on His altar is the heathen, 
and the consecration of it is the Holy Ghost.” 
Never be it forgotten that in the New Testa- 
ment the main function of the Church is, not 
the service of man, but the approach to God. 
And that is the main function of the Church 


¢ 


THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 27 


because it is the main function of its Lord. 
It is also the condition of the best service of 
man; and the Cross which condenses it all as 
an offering to God is itself the gift to man 
of the Father’s heart. 


IV 


The Cross is the gift of the Father’s heart! 
That is a hard saying. Yet it was the faith of 
Christ. “Father,” He said, “glorify Thy Name,” 
as if He had said, “In My Cross reveal Thine.” 
He gave as it was given Him, and what He gave 
was the Cross. To sit on His right hand and 
on His left was not His to give, but to be 
crucified on His right and left was. “If any 
man will come after Me, let him take up his 
cross and follow Me; and where I am there shall 
also My servant be. Cannot you hear that from 
the cross itself? Do you think that is simply 
a promise of glory? It is so exegetically. But 
if it is no more than that, why is it embedded 
in a context of death and suffering only? For 
Christ, death and glory were one. It was not 
that the shame led to the glory. It was the 
glory. Paul, at least, gloried in that shame. 
From the cross itself the words thrill our faith. 
“Where I am there shall My servant be,” 


28 THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 


“Come up unto Me” here. He gave the Cross, 
and gave as He received. He received the Cross. 
It was the Father’s first gift and great grace 
to the Son; the Resurrection was but the 
second. What greater gift is there to us than 
a great trust and a great opportunity? If He 
gave the Son to have life, He also gave Him 
to have death, the power divinely to die. And 
how could He give Him what He had not in 
Himself? The Cross came first from the Father, 
in whom it is eternal. It is no temporary ex- 
pedient, no historic accident. The Father is 
the Redeemer behind all. The source of the 
Father’s grace is not the Son, but the Father. 
That was Christ’s own faith. “I will draw all 
men unto Me,” He said. Yes, but He also said, 
“No man cometh unto Me, except the Father 
who hath sent Me draw him.” We know the 
priesthood and mediation of the Son. Does it 
say nothing of a priesthood and mediation of 
the Father? The Son in His greatest work 
could do nothing but what He saw the Father 
do. Whatever He offered to the Father, He 
only gave Him back His own. God Himself set 
forth the propitiation of Christ. When Christ 
redeemed His Church He could do nothing but 
the Father’s work. The Cross is God working 
in Christ. Shall we say suffering? Why not? 


THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 29 


“It is a patripassian heresy.” But there is the 
suffering of identity and the suffering of 
sympathy. The Father did not suffer as the 
Son (that were too Sabellian), but He suffered 
with the Son. Yea, even when Christ consented 
to die He did what He saw the Father do. It 
cost the Father at least as much as the Son. 
When He spared not His Son, did He spare 
Himself? Did a sword pierce the mother’s soul, 
and not the Father’s also? And did it not 
grieve the Holy Ghost? Our redemption drew 
upon the whole Godhead. Father and Spirit 
were not spectators only of the Son’s agony, 
nor only recipients of His sacrifice. They were 
involved in it. It takes little divinity to accept 
sacrifice. It is the art of the accomplished 
Egoist. The divine thing is to make it. It was 
no trifle for the Son to bring us to the Father ; 
has it been a trifle for the Father to draw you to 
the Son, to appoint the providence that gave you 
knowledge of the Son by all the history of the 
Church till its baptism fell on you, and to over- 
come the reluctance that still hesitates to come 
up to the Cross, and be at home there? It is the 
exalted Son that draws men. Yes, but it is the 
Father that exalted Him, “placarded” Him 
(Gal. iii. 1) before us in crucified glory, and still 
draws every knee to bow to His humiliation. 


30 THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 


It was the Father that put Christ upon the 
cross. Would He have stayed there had it not 
been so, had it not been God’s trust to him? 
For the Son Fatherhood had death in it. It 
meant disheartenment, failure, desertion, heart- 
break. The revelation of the Father had to 
speak that tongue. The God who saves to the 
uttermost saves from the uttermost. He is the 
God of the God-forsaken, the Father of the 
fatherless. “My God,” said Christ then, not — 
“My Father.” When our soul awoke in hell 
He was there. The faith of the saved may be 
radiant, but the faith of the Saviour, and the 
saving hour, had to be a darkling faith. But 
it is the faith that matters; it is neither the 
light nor the dark. 

At least we may say that Fatherhood, if zz 
is to be universal, means death. It cannot be 
missionary without the Cross. It might love 
the lovely without the Cross, but it could not 
redeem, and redeem the bad, black worid. It 
was a fatherly death that Christ obeyed to 
gain the world. The Cross is more called for 
by the fatherhood of such a world than by its 
sovereignty. Is it not? It is a tragic world; 
there is a curse on it. And Fatherhood could 
not come home to it, to its whole grim reality, 
if it did not speak its most tragic note. So 


THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 31 


much of our shallow liberalism never strikes 
that note. The revelation of the Father may 
indeed belong to the poetry of life, but it is to 
the sternest poetry. It is no idyll; it is tragedy, 
the tragedy of history. The world’s new life 
begins in its dreadest hour. The kingdom’s birth 
is the Redeemer’s woe. And the joy of heaven 
Was once in travail with a whole world. The 
universal Church of the Father is the firstborn 
of death. Death was never so solemn and great 
as when it became the word of the Father, and 
founded the Church to win the world. 
~ §o much of our shallow liberalism, I say, never 
strikes that tragic note, never opens the seven 
seals, and, therefore, never sounds our human 
greatness. We fling our pebbles at the mighty 
men of old whose views do not meet our gentler 
taste ; but their minds and souls were oppressed 
with a sense that we have lost of God’s great- 
ness and man’s. Their sense of man’s greatness 
arose from their faith of God’s greatness in 
redemption, not from their sense of the dignity 
of human nature. They did not, indeed, prose- 
cute missions, but they made the faith from 
which missions grew. These did not arise from 
humanitarian sympathy, but from an evan- 
gelical faith largely on Calvinistic lines. It is 
often asked how Calvinism, with its limited area 


32. THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 


of atonement, should have been so wide and 
urgent with its gospel. It is because the width 
of the gospel really springs from its depth, and 
its pity from its greatness. Everything that 
‘enhances the native purity of man, that ex- 


_ tenuates his sin, that diminishes his guilt, and 


/ sets over him but a kind father, really belittles 


his greatness. Man can only have huge guilt 
because capable ‘of great things (Matt. vi. 23). 
It is a tremendous power to be capable of sin 
against God. It betokens, as nothing else but 
holiness can do, the greatness of the soul, and 
its place and its issues. The greatest men, 
like Dante, Calvin, and Milton, who have 
dwelt on the horror of guilt, perdition, and 
hell have done so from .no love of horrors, 
but as the obverse of their sense of the souis 
greatness, of its affairs and issues, its destiny, 
and its doom. To belittle our guilt reduces also 
the greatness of Christ’s work in destroying it. 
And to diminish that is to destroy its uni- 
versality. Nothing that does not dredge the 
depths of the soul can cover the width of the 
world. Nay, the real promise for universal 
man rose from the depths of God Himself. I 
‘would venture to say that missions have more 


. to hope for from a narrow creed which remains 
great than for a wide humanism that runs thin. 


THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH — 33 


The recent decay of missionary faith has gone 
with a genial creed of much sensibility but no 
grandeur and little power. 

You call these thoughts extravagant and 
forced perhaps. Many people do. They think 
Paul fantastic and John obscure. But these men 
were forced upon such faith by the compulsion 
of the Spirit. And on no lower truth can Chris- 
tian missions thrive. The homely pieties cannot 
cope with the great world. We cannot_rest 
missions on a religion of Fatherhood alone. The 
recent gospel of mere Fatherhood has been con- 
current with a decay of missionary zeal. When 
that phase of Christianity knows itself it is 
Unitarianism, which has no missions because 
it has no gospel. Theological differences come 
out in a new light when the practical test of 
missions is applied. Some of them sink out of 
sight, but some become sharper than ever. 
One source of the decay in missionary interest 
is the decay in theological perception and con- 
viction. Vagueness always lowers the tem- 
perature. And our missionary work reveals 
the difference between Unitarianism and our- 
selves to be very real. It lies in the very thing 
which made the Church, by making Christianity 
a mission. It lies in the Son’s Cross, and its 
deep divinity. That Cross was in God’s own 

Missions 4 


34 THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 


history ; and it was no dark episode there, and 
no passing phase. The secret is Godhead is in 
the gospel of Atonement, and of Fatherhood 
by holy death. The whole question between 
Unitarianism and ourselves turns on this. It 
is the question of redemption by God’s dying 
grace, and by a sacrifice in which the Son could 
not outdo the Father. It concerns the close of 
Christ’s life, and not its beginning. The key of 
Christ is there, and not at His origin. It is a ques- 
tion of Christ’s death and its interpretation. It 
concerns the Cross and what was done there once 
and for ever, and done from the last depths of 
God. That is the marrow of the gospel. There 
is that which makes Christ for ever different 
from the race He redeemed, and precious chiefly 
because of the difference. The Redeemer is 
more mighty by what He had not in common 
with men than by what He had. The Redeemer 
of all men is a new category. No man redeemed 
Him. A gospel in which Christ differs from 
men only in degree leaves Him still but a man, 
and soon ceases to win men or to hold them. 
Mankind could never owe itself to an individual 
man—even to the best. Such a gospel may 
impress men, but it does not master them 
and remake them. The greatest, divinest man 
cannot redeem or atone. “The redemption of 


THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH = 35 


the soul is too costly for him, and it must be 
let alone for ever.” Unless the Saviour be 
commensurate with mankind it is but a partial 
relief. But if he be commensurate with man 
he is other than the greatest man. And if 
he be not of the deepest in very God it is no 
redemption. It may help men, or improve, 
but it does not regenerate and re-create. The 
strength of our missions is not in what is 
common to all religions, but in what redeems 
them all from impotence by something it brings 
to all and finds in none. 

The missions of a universal Father rest on a 
gospel of Fatherhood sovereign by death. Is it 
a strange thing, then, that missionaries should 
daily die as other men do not? They minister 
at that world-altar of the Father. They are 
specially delivered unto death. You cannot 
separate the mission and the Passion in a) 
universal Christianity. There is no worl¢ 
crown without the Cross. The world can 
never conquer the world, nor civilisation master 
the huntan soul. War cannot do it, nor diplo- 
macy, nor trade. One supreme empire is a 
deadly dream, a national superstition, the final 
futility of the proud, practical man. The 
victory which overcomes the world is faith; 
and faith not only trusts the Cross, but wears 


36 THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 


it, lives it, and dies it. The Church that missions 
really dies with Christ, and its missionaries but 
show forth its death. They are priests of a sacri- 
ficial Church. You can serve, but you cannot 
save the democracy except by dying for it, and 
sometimes dying at its hands. Arnold Toynbee 
could have told you that. I saw and heard 
the working men he loved stone him with 
jeers, and in a few weeks he died. Hugh Price 
Hughes could have told you that. Perey Alden 
and Herbert Stead could tell you, and Silvester 
Horne will tell you soon, of the daily death 
that comes to the sacred lover of men. So 
neither can we save the heathen but by 
dying for them one way or another. Chalmers 
says it, and Stonehouse, and many a voice from 
beneath the altar and behind the veil. There 
is nothing finer nor more pathetic to me than 
the way in which missionaries unlearn the love 
of the old home, die to their native land, and 
wed their hearts to the people they have served 
and won; so that they cannot rest in England, 
but must return to lay their bones where they 
spent their hearts for Christ. How vulgar the 
common patriotisms seem beside this inverted 
home-sickness, this passion of a kingdom which 
has no frontiers and no favoured race, the 
passion of a homeless Christ! Think of Paton, 


THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH = 37 


the aged, with his New Hebrideans. Here, in 
England, he might say— 


‘From the lone station on the coral island 

Waters divide me and a waste of seas; 
But still my heart is true, their land is my land, 

And in my dreams I see my Hebrides.” 


We are too strange to the Cross if we are 
shocked at such demands. Some have been 
afraid of taking the Cross seriously lest they 
should be swept back from the Father into the 
old orthodoxies. But the fatherhood that does 
not take the Cross seriously and even sternly 
is sentiment and not faith. And it makes men 
too easy with themselves to be faithful to the 
world. One reason why the Church is too little 
missionary abroad is that it is not a missionary 
Church at home. It is established on good 
terms with its world instead of being a foreign 
mission from another. The fatherhood as Christ 
trusted it is our joy and crown, but it is also 
our doom. “Iam crucified unto the world, and 
the world unto me.” It is better to die with 
Christ than to live with the world, to be Christ’s 
priest than the world’s prince. It is not happier, 
but it is better. Back let us go, not only to 
Christ, but to the Cross, to behind the Cross, 
where we see it from the other side. Let us go 


38 THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 


back from our social impatience to the effective 
way of faith—back from our exacting socialism, 
our moral rigorism, our critical severity, and the 
impotence of them all, to the holy, tender sacri- 
fices of the Father’s Cross and the contagious 
obedience of the beloved Son. 

That .is where missions arise and where the 
men are found. Success may bring: money, but 
only the Cross brings both martyrs and heroes. 
We cannot stake our missionary enterprise 
upon results. But if we could, it would not 
be upon the converts but upon the missionaries ; 
not upon the number of converts, but upon the 
cheerful faith, sacrifice, and courage of the 
missionaries and those behind them. Were 
the number of converts even less than it is, 
you cannot respect Paul, Boniface, Patrick, 
Paterson, Hannington, Mackay, Livingstone, 
Moffat, Chalmers without believing in missions. 
And without believing in missions you cannot 
even respect these men, you can but pity 
them. And the man that has only pity for 
such is in a pitiful case. There is no more 
heroic region of human valour. There is not 
in army or navy a focus of such bravery as 
each mission-house shows. There are no deeds 
that won our Empire so stirring to good blood 
as the exploits of -Christ’s kingdom in new 


THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH = 39 


lands. There are no fortitudes so long, strong, 
and silent as those which underlie the early 
Christianity of a new race. Take Africa alone. 
In the eighteenth century the Moravians lost 
all their twelve missionaries on the West Coast. 
The Wesleyans followed them and lost sixty- 
three men in fifty years. The Basle Society 
lost in the same time twenty-nine men out of 
one hundred and seven. The American Society _. 
has lost, since 1847, fifty-four out of ninety. 
In Surinam, out of three hundred and ten 
missionaries one hundred and thirty-four suc- 
cumbed in less than a century to the awful 
climate. The Central African Mission of the 
London Missionary Society was begun twenty- 
six years ago. There have been sent out forty- 
one missionaries. Of these twenty-one died 
after a mission life of about two and a half 
years, and eight retired from fever. I say 
nothing of the deaths of wives and children. 
The percentage of premature loss is fifty-three. 
This tremendous cost is only paralleled by the 
heavy casualties among the South Sea teachers 
in New Guinea. “The Report for 1894,” says 
Mr. Horne, “contains the tragic statement that 
since the Mission was established, twenty years 
before, over one hundred and twenty had died 
of fever, poison, or massacre in New Guinea. 


40 THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 


And yet more volunteers had only to be asked 
for and there was a quick, glad, eager response.” 
I need only remind you of the dreadful mortality 
in the Baptist Congo Mission, where thirty men 
died in fifteen years, 1880-95 (besides wives or 
children), or in the Church Missionary Society, 
or the China Inland Mission. And there is 
always a ready supply of men and women to 
goon. Such records leave out the martyrdoms 
like Williams, Pattison, Hannington, Chalmers. 
They leave out the grief of relatives, the long 
struggle with isolation and solitude, the shame 
under the contempt of white men who are more 
intractable and heathen than the heathen 
themselves. And they were deaths not on the 
massed and fiery field, but on the lonely out- 
post plains. 

How easy it would be to Re such figures 
from all over the world! What is it all 
for? Why do men and women do these 
things? Because they have believed unto 
blood, and they are members, not only of 
Christ’s Church, but of His Cross, and agents 
of His death. The largest family on earth 
is the fraternity of sorrow, and its firstborn 
are the company of the Cross. Sorrow and 
death is a universal tongue. It is the pre- 
pared language of a universal religion. And 


THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 41 


if the missionary cannot understand it, his 
gospel is hid and lost. But they have learned 
it in its home with Christ and spoken it freely, 
and made it tell of endless sacrifice and love. I 
cannot remember since boyhood passing a day 
without pain; but I think my life a piece of 
disheartening self-indulgence when I read 
missionary biography and track its quavering 
red line of apostolic succession from the begin- 
ning till now. It is a past with a promise. That 
cannot be in vain. If it could, the greatest 
things would be the most futile and the cynic 
would be the only true prophet. These deeds 
and deaths reproduce themselves. They increase 
and multiply, and replenish the earth. And they 
nerve the Church with their solemn infection. 
In about ten years from 1876 the London 
Missionary Society lost in Central Africa ten 
men and nine had to retire—all out of twenty- 
three. Yet the Directors solemnly resolved “to 
prosecute the Mission with greater earnest- 
ness than ever.” This was courage of the 
missionaries’ own kind, and the bold strategy, 
the audacious prudence, of the Holy Ghost, 
such as the true-born soldier loves. It is 
the large, exalted, anointed recklessness that 
took Christ to the cross and won the world. 
And it is courage in the face of fearful odds, 


42 THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 


such as a British race should love. What is 
our pittance of money, our fits of sympathy, 
beside long, lonely devotions like these multi- 
plied all over the earth? Their voices haunt us 
from graves baking in African suns or soaking 
in malarial swamps, or watched by the lion and 
the lizard that cannot break their sleep. They 
demand that we shall not let their work be 
wasted, or their blood be like water spilt upon 
the ground, or their quiet resolve choked in the 
dust that stops their mouths. This work has 
cost too much to fail now. And it is a sacred 
investment that we can only save by investing 
more. The mission field is a great Aceldama 
and field of blood. It is the cemetery of the 
Lord’s vanguard. There are too many precious 
bones mouldering there, and too many lives 
enshrined, for us to let it be trodden down by 
hordes of Paganism, black or white. And that 
soil, too, is fat with sacrificial blood and faithful 
dust. It is classic with martyr tombs. Any 
people is deeply sunk that permits the decay of 
its precious tombs. And how can we leave to 
barbarism the cells of these hermits of faith 
and saints of Christ? We can build them 
worthy shrines only by carrying forward their 
work. 

But even that we cannot do by dwelling on 


a 


THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 438 


their heroism. Why did they go? Was it 
mere restless, soulless love of adventure? Is 
their story but a book for boys, or a theme 
for reciters? Why did they labour? Was it 
simply to escape ennui? Was it for a house 
in Park-lane? And did they die out of mere 
doggedness? They went because sent. They 
worked because God worked in them, and they 
died because He died and His death was sacra- 
mental in them. And if their work be pro- 
longed and their dying repeated, it can only 
be because the death that was their inspiration 
becomes the spirit of our life and the soul 
of our soul. I know everything that can be 
said to belittle their heroism and make it look 
humdrum. It cannot be more humdrum 
than they often felt their daily round to be. 
But I am sure, too, that there was nothing 
belittling in the welcome they had from the 
brave beyond the river. And there was 
nothing common or mean in the meeting 
when their devotion rejoined its one source 
in Christ. He never ceases to remember His 
Cross in a way to transfigure every cross since 
then with a generous light. The reverence for 
missionary memories and graves is worthy 
sentiment. It is more: it is true emotion. I 
should think little of myself if I did not feel 


44 THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 


it. But yet, that is not the passion which fills 
the ranks as fast as they are emptied. It is but 
the lily-work on the capitals; it is not the pillar 
of the faith. I know we do not make enough 
of our martyrs. I am sure that hagiology 
should be more used than it is in the education 
of the Church’s young. The saints are beyond 
caring; the loss is ours. But all the same it is 
not upon saint worship that our faith stands, 
or moves to still greater things. We are not 
saved by self-sacrifice, not by the worship of it. . 
“Tt is far easier,” said Maeterlinck, “to sacri- 
fice self than to fulfil our spiritual destiny.” 
That destiny is to meet our high calling in 
Christ Jesus, to take Him for what He is, and 
find ourselves by the way in Him. It is not 
our sacrifice that tells, but our union with 
the sacrifice of Christ which is the sacrifice of 
God. There are many self-sacrificers for one 
true believer. Sacrifice is not the last word 
of our soul’s duty. It is Christ, the holy will 
of God, the Saviour, and the world-Saviour. — 
For we are only saved in a saved world. It is 
on this faith our missions stand, upon the 
passion of saved certainty, of soul conviction, 
of spiritual love which surmounts all spiritual 
egotism. The perpetual inspiration of missions 
and their staying power is not piety to the 


THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 45 


fallen saints, nor is it the thrill of their grey 
romance. It is the experience of the like un- 
earthly faith. It is self-sacrifice which does 
not think of the sacrifice, but of Christ. The 
greatest things have been done by men who 
had their eyes on something else than their 
self-sacrifice. Little turns on the self, little 
on the sacrifice, everything on the God. We 
have sometimes to sacrifice to Him the passion 
for sacrifice. What matters is not who sacri- 
fices, nor what he sacrifices, but to whom we 
offer it all. Neither is Paul anything, nor the 
giving of my body to be burned, but Christ is 
allinall. The battle is too grim and long to be 
sustained by even sacred sentiment or spiritual 
romance. The more we know of the world 
the more. doubtfully we ask, “Can such a 
world be saved?” And the more we know of 
Christian nations, the more incredulously we 
ask, “Can these be the saviours?” As we re- 
coil discouraged, and sometimes disillusioned, 
from the poor and pauperised results of our 
philanthropy, we ask, with some bitterness at 
its waste, “Is this saving the people?” And 
as we read the history of the Church itself and 
its results of two thousand years we ask in 
despair, “And is the thing we see salvation?” 
But the more we know of Christ's Cross for 


46 THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 


ourselves, the less can we believe that any- 
thing is beyond its power or any soul outside 
its destined range. We have a faith that 
outlasts even our impulses of sacrifice, our hot 
fits and our cold. It survives all the challenges 
of life. It is absolute against a world in arms. 
Our methods need criticism, but our principle 
is beyond it. Can that comfortable, greedy, 
selfish, wicked, devilish world be saved? Ex- 
perience wavers. Common-sense denies. But 
faith is sure. It is already done. This is high 
ground ; but I am not making a speech, even on 
missions ; I am preaching the Gospel, which if it 
is not extravagant is not true. The great thing 
is already done. What needs doing is all less than 


has been done. What has to be done for the 


world is already done in God. “A glorious throne 
set on high from the beginning is the place of 
our sanctuary.” Is this mystical? But that is 
not the point. Is it real? Is it true at our 
real centre, where we are what we are, and 
where we measure the world? Our missions 
but proclaim on the housetop what is told us 
in the most secret place. The world has been 
saved. We live in the midst of a universal 
salvation, even if the whole world lie in wicked- 
ness. If all men else denied that, we know it. 
God has a few to whom He whispers in the ear. 


—S =~ 


THE FATHERHOOD OF DEATH 47 


Most of the world does deny it, and no few 
of the Church; but the New Testament is sure 
of it. Christ was sure of it. He is sure of it. 
And His certainty is more than all the mis- 
givings of our experience. His faith in Himself 
takes possession of us. We have the Holy 
Ghost. God has given us the reconciliation. 
All things are yours—life, death, and the future, 
thrones, policies, and Satans, all heavens, 
worlds, and hells. “All things are delivered 
unto Me of the Father.” “Ye are Christ's, and 
Christ is God’s.” 

Is it true? Are you quite sure it is true— 
quite, quite sure, with the certainty of the 
secret place, the solemn Church, the new life, 
and the old historic Word? Then arise, sing, for 
your light has come, and the glory of the Lord 
is risen upon you. 


** Awake, our souls! away, our fears! 
Let every trembling thought be gone! 

Awake, and run the heavenly race, 

And put a cheerful courage on.” 


A Madse dt ul 


ape 
eae: 
Rey 


FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 


ET us approach these words from our 
Lord’s standpoint; then let us pass on to 
what they carry for the situation of His Church 
to-day. Christ always spoke to the historical 
occasion in the first place. He did not speak 
over His age to be direct only with us; he spoke 
to the great questions of His time. His task 
was as real for that day as for any. It was in| 
solving the problem of His own generation that’ 
He solved the world’s problem. He is what He 
is to us because of what He actually was to the 
complete spiritual situation around Him. 
What, then, were the ruling issues of His age 
and race? Were they not these—sin, righteous- 
ness, and judgment ? 


wee 


I 


And, first, note the relations of these three 


ideas. To know what sin is you must know 
1 


52 FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 


what righteousness is. To be quite sure of 
righteousness, you must be sure how it will 
stand at the end in relation to sin. It must 
stand over sin, and judge it, and destroy it. 
J Judgment i is not ] primarily pu punishment, nor is it 
a mere declaration of the : state e of the law, but it 
is the actual final establishment of righteousness 

upon the wreck of sin. The stroke of sin upon 
sanctity can only evoke judgment, which by the 
grace of Christ becomes salvation. In the world 
it is sin that judges righteousness, and does 
with it what it will. In the kingdom of God it 
is righteousness that judges sin, and does with 
it the will of God—it destroys it. 

It was on these points, therefore, that Christ's 
quarrel with His contemporaries turned. It 
was there that He broke with His age and its 
leaders, and they with Him. It was there He 
ceased to be the mere child of His time. Both 
He and His foes believed in the kingdom of God. 
Both believed it to be a kingdom of righteous- 
ness. Both believed that it could only be set up 
by an act of Divine visitation and judgment. 
But they understood words differently. What 
is the righteousness of God? What is sin? 


What is the judgment of God? The answer of 


the Jews was prompt. “Righteousness is keeping 
our law. Sin is breaking or despising it. Judg- 


FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 53 


ment is the interference of God to reward our 
righteousness, to confound those that despise 
it, to establish Israel and its code on the necks 
of the nations, and in sight of the world to 
declare Israel alone to be right, and all else 
wrong.” Righteous judgment, as the Jewish 
type of Englishman would say, is to reward 
with empire the superior and constitutional 
people. 

Now, to all this Christ gave the flattest denial. 
“T with My kingdom am the righteousness of 
God. To resist and renounce Me is sin. My 
victory is true judgment, and judgment begins 
at the house of God.” That was a clear 
' issue and challenge between Christ and Israel. 
it is the greatest ever presented to the world; 
and it is as real and great to-day as then. The 
verdict of the world was invited on it in the 
very act of going out with the gospel. The 
apostles really did what Paul did—they appealed 
unto Cesar. They turned to the Gentiles; they 
went to the public; they appealed to human 
nature with the cause that Judea had con- 
demned. 

* We constitutionalists are righteous,” said the 
Jews with entire sincerity. ‘You, Jesus, with 
your claims and criticisms, are the sinner of 
a most blasphemous sin. We must pass on you 


us wctedy ve P 
‘os CN 
ras 


54 FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION | 


the judgment of God, which is there to destroy 
sin and you, and to magnify the law you belittle. 
In the name of the very God and righteousness 
you preach, we suppress you as a schismatic. 
Would we could ignore you, but you will not 
allow us to do that. For God's sake we will 
stamp you out and your witness, and we shall 
call in the help of the State to do it. God can- 
not speak except by His legal Church and His 
imperial race, nor save the nation otherwise. 
And that the nation perish not, you who chal- 
lenge that Church must die. That is how we 
conceive of sin, righteousness, and judgment.” 

It is an old, old story, but to-day it is as new 
as ever. 

And the counter plea of Christ was : “ You are 
not righteous, but, by your very constitutionalism 
and patriotism, you are the enemies of God and 
His righteousness. Were you the children of 
God you would recognise Me, who am the Son 
of God. If you did His will you would recognise 
My teaching. His sheep hear My voice. Your 
own past, if you could read it, appeals to you 
in Me no less than your own God. The sin 
of sins is yours. Sin is your relation to Me. 
Righteousness is the way I go. My rejection 

_is your damnation. In the death you adjudge 
to Me I do a deed which is judgment to oe 


FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 55 


The judgment of God is not through you upon 
Me, but through Me upon you. My suffering 
is your perdition. That is the destruction of sin 
by righteousness. It is the establishment of 
righteousness upon the neck of your sin once 
and for ever. It is the mortal wound of the 
world-power you serve. It is the doom of 
the worldly world in the worldly Israel. It 
is the central encounter of God with Satan, 
and the eternal victory.” 

Such was the moral issue presented to the 
world when the historic gospel went out on the 
lips of the apostles. Which was right? It is 
the moral issue on which every man, nation, and 
Church must give a practical verdict. It is no 
mere problem of history, no mere matter of 
antique interest, no mere collision between a 
nation and a genius that arose within it. 
That might describe the death of Socrates at 
the hands of Athens. But the controversy 
between Christ and Israel is vital to every age, 
and continued in it. The work of the Spirit is, 
by the preaching of the gospel, to carry convic- 
tion on this point home to the world. It is to 
master the world with the eternal gravity of 
this moral issue for every conscience and every 
people. It is to make certain the foregone 
finality of this spiritual victory for the whole 


56 FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 


race. And it is to suggest to each Church that 
it is Churches, and not individuals, that are in 
peril of the sin against the Holy Ghost. Angli- 
canism to-day is doing with the Free Churches. 
what Judaism did with Christ—it is ignoring, 
denying, and perverting the manifest signs and 
wonders in us of the Holy Ghost. It calls us 
bodies—it refuses to call us Churches. 


II 


Now let us take verse 11 in particular and 
work up to its strict sense. Verse 9 says that 
sin is measured by our relation to a Person and 


not a law. And verse 10 says that the Spirit 


of Christ coming from the Father shows that 
Christ is there, which further shows that His 
earthly claim was right. For had it been false 
it was not to the Father He would have gone 
when He left the world. Look closer. 

Verse 9—“ The Spirit will convince the world 
of sin, in that they believe not in Me.” He 
will show the real nature of sin. “How shall 
we work the works of God?” it was asked; 
and it was answered by Christ, “This is the 
work of God, to believe on Him whom He hath 


sent.” Sin, you note, is not measured by a law, ‘ 
or a nation, or a society of any kind, but by 


FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 57 


a Person. The righteousness of God was not 
in a requirement, system, book, or Church, but 
in a Person, and sin is defined by relation to 
Him. He came to reveal not only God but sin. 
The essence of sin is exposed by the touchstone 
of His presence, by our attitude to Him. He 
makes explicit what the sinfulness of sin is; He 
even aggravates it. He rouses the worst as well 


as the best of human nature. There is nothing » «...... 
that human nature hates like holy God. All the .x-. ASS 
world’s sin receives its sharpest expression when ' 


in contact with Christ; when, in face of His 
moral beauty, goodness, power, and claim, He is 
first ignored, then discarded, denounced, called 
the agent of Beelzebub, and hustled out of the 
against God was done in the name of God 
by genuine believers, by a Church. The 
sin against the Holy Ghost is real enough; 
but it is the sin of an age, rather than of 
an individual; and it is the sin of an age’s 
religion; not of its indifference or pagan- 
ism, but its religion, its Church. It is the sin 


world in the name of God. The great al 


of men who believe in Satan enough to call. 


satanic the very action of God. It is the sin of 
a religion. It is the sin of certain Churches 
in their treatment of others to-day. And it is 
preparing for certain Churches a great shock 


i 


58 FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 


and awakening. The power of the Spirit acts 
by confounding and humbling the world 
(especially that part of it in the Church) with 
this discovery, that there is but one sin, the 
sin of touching the Son of God in His spiri- 
tual effects, and yet practically calling Him 
the child of the devil, as the pre-Christian 
Church did. The Spirit's judgment is not on 
_ the intellectual sceptic; he is not a danger- 
ous character in the Bible. It is the moral 
sceptic that is to be confounded, the Church 
worldling, the religious Pharisee, the breed of 
those who tried Christ the Trier of the reins, 
the living Conscience, and found Him wanting. 
They knew the law as He did not, but they 
knew no better than to judge their Judge. The 
conviction by the Spirit was the conviction of 
moral dullards, whether religious or worldly, 
whether pious or profane. It was the religious 
men without moral insight, men of the tradi- 
tional, churchly, crusted, and patriotic conscience, 
men who said that conscience was, oh! a most 
tender place, and their conscience would not 
allow them to forget their dreams of Empire 
and recognise Christ or His claims. They 
believed in Empire, but not in the kingdom. 

Verse 10—« Of righteousness, because I go to 
My Father, and ye see Me no more.” What is 


FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 59 


the meaning of “because”? It is this: If He |. 


had not been right with the claims He made 
He could not have gone to the Father when 
He died. If He went to the Father, if His 


Spirit convinced men that He was there and ~ 


was acting from there, then He had been 
right in the claims He made about His rela- 
tions to the Father and about His judgment 
of the world, and especially of Israel’s sin. 
The apostolic fact of His resurrection was 
proof that Israel’s God confirmed the claim of 
Christ, and gave judgment for Him against 
Israel. That was what settled the matter for 


Paul. As soon as he was convinced that God) 
had raised up Christ and set Him at His right ) 
hand in glory, the whole fabric of his Judaism ’’ 


gave way. God would not raise a fanatic, 
impostor, or blasphemer. The Spirit convinced 
Paul that Jesus was the Holy One and the 
Just—nay, the very Righteousness of God; 
that the sin of sins lay with the people who 
thought themselves the best of the good. 

Sin, and righteousness, and salvation are the 
questions Christ answers; and they are ques- 
tions addressed to the moral judgment. By 
your moral judgments you stand or fall. It 
is not by your views (even on the Resurrection), 
not by your pieties, mysticisms, sympathies 


' 


: 


60 FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 


energies, or philanthropies, but by your moral 
verdicts and decisions, especially on persons, and 
essentially on Christ, that you are justified or 
condemned. What think ye of Christ in the way 

of moral verdict, moral attitude, personal com- 
 mittal, personal experience, and habit of soul? 
Your opinion is not asked about the miracle 
of His birth or any other single point. What 
is the actual, practical, habitual relation of your 
whole moral self to Him as a living personal 
whole? How do you dispose of the Self which 
determines your life, conduct, aspirations, and 
devotions? Above all, what is Christ's relation 
to your sin and your goodness? The Spirit 
convinces the world that Christ was righteous 
because He is a Spirit that comes from the 
Father, because He comes from Christ who 
is there, from Christ who on leaving earth 
finished righteousness, perfected judgment, set 
up the kingdom, and went to the Father and 
not to the devil, as He must have done if, 
with all His arrogant claims, He was not the 
very Christ and righteousness of God. 

Verse 11—“Of judgment, because the prince 
of this world has been judged.” Has been; that 
correction of a tense affects the whole com- 
plexion of our Christianity. The world-spirit 

was gathered into one head, and that head 


FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 61 


was crushed in a final crisis and absolute 
judgment by Christ. So far was the death 
of Christ from having its chief effect on man 
that it acted primarily in the spiritual world. 
And there it acted not solely on God, but on 
the power of evil gathered and personalised. 

The nerve and marrow of sin was the 
rejection of Christ, because He was the nerve | 
and marrow of the righteousness of God. 
To all appearance it was evil that prevailed, 
and sin was master of the field. But the 
Spirit's work is to convince the world of the 
very opposite. It is to confound common 
sense by the grandest paradox. It reverses 
the verdict of mere history and mere opinion. 
It upsets what would have been the judg- 
ment of every newspaper published the day 
after the Crucifixion, and every historian from 
Josephus to Tacitus. In the judgment passed 
on Christvit was the judges that were judged, 
‘whether Jew or Greek. There are victories 
that are defeats. In the victory of sin, sin 
received its deathblow. Sin left its sting in 
Christ, but it cost sin its life. 

In the triumph of the world over Christ 
the spiritual principle of the world was tried, 
judged, condemned, and, in principle slain. 
The absolute ultimate judgment of the world 


62 FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 


took place in Christ’s death. There God spoke 
His last word—His last endless word. The last 
moral reality is there, the last standard, the 
last judgment. The last judgment is behind 
us. The true judgment-seat of Christ, where 
we must all appear, is the Cross. I would 
speak of these two things—moral reality and 


final judgment. 


III 


To this end let me now take some words of 
the text for special emphasis. 

1. The word “convince” is as misleading a 
translation as the word “comforter.” The 
proper word is “convict.” And conviction is 
neither a magical work nor a logical, it is 
moral; it is to carry home to the world 
moral reality. And there is only one way to 
do that—by an act of judgment which both lays 
bare our moral case and reveals God’s moral 
passion to save. God’s judgment of the world 
in Christ is the greatest religious act ever done 
in history. It is a moral conviction that is 
to be produced, no doubt, but it cannot be 
adequately produced by ethical means alone— 
only by spiritual. It comes, not by the 
progress of any moral order, but by the action 


“<a 


FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 63 


of Christ’s Holy Ghost; by the morality, not 
of heroic insight, but of penitent faith and 
power. 

The spread of a Christianity mainly ethical 
plays into the hands of Rome. It is the sub- 
stitution of a law for a gospel. The attempt 
to define Christianity by the Sermon on the 
Mount is a mistake of this kind. It is what 
misleads men like Tolstoi and the great 
number of high-minded young people who are 
reading Tolstoi as if he were a new revelation 
and not an outgrown phase like Francis, or 
any other medieval saint or ascetic. Much, 
indeed, can be done by the appeal to the 
natural conscience. I will not deny an original 
righteousness as well as original sin. Much 
has been done by the response of our original 
righteousness to the good and the just. Great 
grace be on our ethical teachers and prophets! 
But the greatest work cannot be done so. 
The Lord’s controversy is above the purest 
human bar. To appeal to our natural inte- 


grity in the plea of God against the whole 


world is to take a Crown case to a County 
Court. We must all stand before the judg- 
ment-seat of Christ, the supernatural Cross. 
It is beyond the jurisdiction of the natural 
conscience. Nay, to appeal to the natural 


~~ 


64 FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION ~ 


conscience is to appeal to the judge to give 
the case against himself. It is just the natural 
conscience against which a conviction is asked. 
The natural conscience is not enough for the 
last moral crisis of the world. The last moral 
crisis is just produced by its failure. Natural 
goodness is not good enough to cope with the 
evil that is in its own world. It can be heroic 
and fine, but it is a heroism that ebbs with 
the ages if it is left to itself and tried on a 
historic scale. The natural conscience shares 
the rest of Nature’s mortal fate; it has not 
life in itself. The need of Redemption just 
consists in the impotence of the conscience, 
its plague and its pain. It is too dead to save 
itself, too living not to feel dead. The final 
moral conviction cannot be brought about by 
the conscience alone, but by God’s Spirit in 
the conscience. There is no repentance so 
precious as the repentance of the good and 
holy. None are so deeply forgiven as those 
who never forgive themselves. It is with 
such that the work of the Spirit lies. It is 
not the work of the ethical stalwarts, nor of 
Nature’s noblemen, but of the humbled 
apostles and monuments of grace. It is not 
the victory of the chivalry of righteousness, 
but of the warriors of the Holy Ghost. This 


ty 


FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 65 


kingdom comes only by the Cross. It is estab- 
lished only by the act of saving judgment there. 
The gospel is the one compendious condition 
of the world’s moral renovation. Without 
atonement there is no justice done to the 
moral order. Salvation, if it means anything 
real, means a new heart; and the new heart is 
not simply a new affection, but a new relation, a 
new man, the conscience forgiven, recreated, and 
reassured before God by the atoning, recon- © 
ciling act of God. That is real religion, real 
faith. That is what gives the great accent 
of reality. It does not mean being true to 
our convictions; it means that our convictions 
be true to the conviction and conversion of 
the conscience by the Holy Spirit, true to the 
central moral reality of the Cross, true to the 
new world set up by God’s condemnation of 
the old world there. 

Moral reality! there is nothing that so much 
needs to be restored to religion for its power 
over society as the note of reality. We want 
sincerity, but we want much more. We want a 
religion in which the man is not only honest, 
but founded on what makes the issue and. the 
honesty of all the world and all eternity. If 
conscience were true to reality, it would be 
more easy to be true to conscience. 

Missions 6 


66 FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 


And what is this rock reality of things? It is 
not the moral order of the world, but the will 
and grace of God within the moral order, vindi- 
cating it, and working out by judgment and 
sacrifice the moral restoration of the world. Do 
not accuse me of philosophising when I speak 
of the. last moral reality. If that be a thought 
foreign to our faith, we need go no farther to 
find why our faith is weak, and society is escap- 
ing from it. We are not simple when we resent 
such speech, but slaves of simplicity—we are 
victims of the obvious. 

It is the bane of much current religion that it 
has been divorced from reality and soaked 
in sentiment and fancy. We are debauched by_ 
pathetic fallacies. The object of faith has been 
detached from the active forces of life and the 
world. By some dislocation God in the Cross 
does not coincide with the chief moral action 
and issue of the age. Religion has become an 
irrelevancy and an impertinence to much of the 
world’s most vigorous and effectual life. Nay, 
much of the best conscience of the world is in 
the service of a realism which suspects or-rejects 
Christian teaching. Is it fiction or preaching that 
is doing more to-day to mould and guide life? 
And is the ethic of fiction the evangelical ethic? 
What is the value of the Church’s opinion to 


vial JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 67 


the men who shape public affairs? What do 
they care for its moral verdict except as votes? 
The world has the impression that Ibsen is a 
moral realist and the Church is not. It thinks 
the Church, especially on its Protestant side, 
does not take seriously the malady it is always 
deploring, and does not deal radically, faithfully, 
and finally with it. In a word, it does not feel 
that the Church has the note of judgment. 
Whereas there is no moral realism like that of 
the New Testament—especially, for instance, St. 
John’s Epistles. And it is the very work of the 
Spirit to lead us into all reality, even more than 
into all truth. Truth meant for the Apostles 
realities more than truths. We are not saved 
by believing truths, but by trusting ourselves to 
the reality of Christ’s work upon the moral 
universe. We are not sanctified by seeing into 
truths, but by living upon Christ, the spiritual 
Rock. The reality of our soul meets the reality 
of the whole moral world in the atoning, redeem- 
ing action of Christ. Js it not in moral things 
that we find the real world? Is reality not a prac- 
tical thing? It is nota quest of the philosophers 
chiefly. Realities are the realities of life, of its 
experience, of its needs, crises, destinies. What 
are real prayers? Not those that betray 
irrelevant fancy, fervid imagination, and a great 


Babi: 
68 FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 


power of fluent pathos or of soaring wing— 
what is wrongly called a “ gift in prayer”—but 
those that rise, with even a broken and a trailing 
wing, from the real situations, experiences, or 
emergencies of actual life. Realities are the 
realities of life. And is not life what con- 
science’ makes it? But not the heroic con- 
science. Ours is. a guilty conscience. Surely 
then it is what saves the conscience from 
its guilt that makes real both the conscience 
and the world. The one reality for a sinful 
world is the reality of a Redeemer. The Church 
has gone astray in this matter; it has sought 
the Divine on metaphysical rather than moral 
lines; and it has lost in moral sagacity and 
efficiency. It has sought the great reality of the 
Incarnation in Christ's cradle rather than in 
Christ’s cross. It has thought of the new 
righteousness as something miraculously in- 
fused into humanity rather than morally con- 
quered for humanity. For St. Paul the Word 
was made flesh because He was made sin, but 
for the Church it was because He was made an 
infant. It has thought of the miracle of God’s 
presence as a cosmic miracle of birth rather 
than as a moral miracle of grace, a miracle of 
holiness, conflict, death, judgment, and victory. 
It has sought the Divine in Christ’s hypostatic 


FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 69 


nature rather than in His conscience, and its 
atoning work for man’s guilty conscience ; and 
so its standard of reality has been perverted, 
unmoralised; and in moral things it has 
not for society the real note. But, even when 
we put the accent on the Cross, we may 
pronounce it wrong. We may shorten the 
saving Word. We may see but a partial 
Cross. \/ 
The decay of the sense of reality is caused 
by that decay in our moral sense which misses 
the note of judgment. Our convictions do not 
start from a sense that we are convicted. We 
want _to be convinced by evidence where we 
should be be convicted-by_ the Spirit, This is an 
element that h: has d dropped out of our view of 
the Cross, and therefore out of much Christian 
life ; Christ crucified, we think, took the pain of 
sin but not its penalty, its sorrow but not its 
curse. We have of late done justice to the idea + 
of sacrifice in connection with the Cross; but in | 
the same proportion we have lost the idea of | 
judgment. We have revived the ethical idea of 
the kingdom of God, but we have not grasped 
the idea, which fills both Old Testament and 
New Testament, that it could only be set up bya 
decisive act of holy judgment upon the kingdom 
of the world. The Cross was indeed the Divine 


i oe 
Brie: i 


70 FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 


sacrifice, but sacrifice is not a final idea without 
judgment. It is not an end in itself, except to 
the ascetics—it is a means. But judgment is 
an end, it is final in its nature, because it is the 
actual vindication of holiness and the establish- 
ment of righteousness, and beyond holiness and 
its victory we cannot go. Our loss of moral 
reality is only another form of that loss of 
judgment which we also call the decay in the 
sense of sin. This decay is nothing less than 
the age’s spiritual cowardice ; it is the shirking 
of the actual moral situation of the world. 
Our whole judgment, our good sense, suffers 
from not judging ourselves. Moral realism 
| face its sin, and judge it and the ethical 
situation it creates. It means that an age 
should face it—the age’s thought and its 
Church. But the Church is for the hour more 
engrossed with the arrears of attention it 
owes to human pain and misfortune, And it 
begins to lose the note of moral power, moral 
guidance, and actual authority. It cannot 
grapple with social sins, because it is habitu- 
ally not at close quarters with sin, and its 
judgment, and its conquest. It is playing with 
young people and exercised about peccadillos, 
when it should be quelling spiritual wicked- 


FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 71 


ness in high places. Nothing but the real 
and final victory over sin (which was _ its 
judgment in Christ) can give the power to 
handle public sins, to impress and direct the 
public conscience. It is more important to be | 
sure we are forgiven than to be sure we are 
doing good. The art of pardon is greater than — 
even the art to heal. 

2. Then the prince of this world! Do you 
think of him as one who holds in his tyranny a 
world of victims who are miserable because they 
struggle in his yoke? That is not the conception 
here at all. He represents here all that is most | 
congenial to the world’s way. He is the per- 
sonalised spirit of a willing and admiring world. 
He is the organ of a world proud of its repre- 
sentative. He has its confidence. He is the 
agent of methods which the world thinks 
essential to its prosperity and stability, which 
make its notion of eternal life. The world he 
represents has no idea that its moral methods 
ean be bettered or its principles overthrown. 
To its mind the moral is an impertinence and 
the spiritual is a superstition—feeble, but 
capable of becoming dangerous. It must there- 
fore be fought. And its antagonist is just as 
sensible of the antagonism. There is no com- 
promise possible. They were destined to meet 


72 FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION — 


in a struggle which is inevitable and a judgment 
which is final—and that meeting was in the 
Cross. 

“The last sudement ” is a phrase which we 
have almost robbed of its effect because we have 
used it chiefly for a remote and pictorial future. 
We have dwelt on the final date of judgment, 
and lost sense of a state of judgment, a judg- 
ment always there, and always final in its nature. 
We have pictured it in ways which have emptied 
it of spiritual awe, and reduced it to little more 
than physical terror and moral impotence. We 
do not realise that the prince of this world has 
been finally judged, and that we live in a saved 
world only because we live in a judged world. 
Either with the orthodox we have made judg- 
ment a cosmic catastrophe (and astronomy is 
full of them, and geology has made them too 
familiar), or we have reduced it, with the 
liberals, to the historic process on its ethical 
side, with its moral crises, and jail-deliveries, 
and fresh starts, from time to time. We Ve have 
lost_ the note of judgment from the Beane Cross, 
and SO from our. moral world. “And we have 
lost it, with the orthodox, in a distant judg- 
ment scene, or with the liberals, who made it 
the mere nemesis of history, which is too slow 
and subtle to curb the pushing hour. “The 


. 
| 


‘aN 


\ 


FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 73 


world’s history is the world’s judgment,” says 
Schiller. He wished to recall the last judgment 
from its remoteness to be a power in the heart 
of present things and living conduct. But 
there is something more true than Schiller’s 
famous phrase. It is not the world’s history, 
but Christ’s history that is the world’s judg- 
ment. And especially is it Christ’s Cross. The 
Cross, I keep saying, is God’s final judgment on 
the world. It_is the eternal moral measure ‘e of 
the world. There _ is no ethic but a Christian 
ethic. Christ is not Judge merely at some future 
coming. He is eternal Judge in His great work 
as the Crucified, a work historic yet timeless 
and final. In Him the prince of this world has 
been finally and effectually judged, and the 
absolute condemnation passed. Satan then fell 
from his heaven. The absolute and irreversible 
judgment was passed upon evil. There, too, the 
judgment of our sins fell once for all on the 
Holy One and the Just. The judgment Christ 
exercises stands on the judgment He endured. 
He assumes judgment because he absorbed it. 
Salvation and judgment are intertwined; they 
are not consecutive, in any moral faith. It is 
only by judgment that salvation could come; 
it was our judgment fallen on Christ that was 
our salvation; and it is this salvation that is 


74 FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION — 


our worst judgment. True love always creates 
responsibility and sings of judgment. Our worst 
condemnation is not that we have sinned, ‘but 
that we have refuged to be saved from _our 
sin. “He that believeth not is condemned 
* already.” When love forgets judgment love 
loses its solemnity, because its supreme word 
in Christ is separated from the idea of moral 
curse, moral passion, and moral expiation; and 
the final act of the love of God in the Cross 
becomes then but a kind and powerless tale, 
because the saving Cross is not also 30 the on one 
moral transaction of the world, the “judgment 
of the whole sin of the world by God’s jealous, 


unsparing holiness. There sacrifice rose to 
judgment, and judgment worked by sacrifice. 
When Christ loved me and ransomed me God 
gave Himself to His own holy law which I 
broke, and He took its judgment on my sin. 
The final judgment has been passed; God's 
utmost has been done; it is soaking into history 
and society. It is less coming than come. We 
walk with the Son of God in a consuming 
fire. Its action should colour all faith with a 
more godly fear, a more strenuous moral tone, 
and a more commanding word. All that is 
yet to come, with all its fearful expectation, 
is but the working out of that final and eternal 


FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 75 


solemnity which transpired when in the Cross 
of Christ the prince of this world was judged, 
and cast into the outer darkness. Any judgment 
that may come at the end of time can only 
be the last stage of that same judgment in 
which all our faith begins. The work of the 
Spirit to-day is to restore this element to faith, 
to moralise faith by the judgment in the Cross, 
to evangelise ethics by the same means, and to 
replace the great white throne in our spiritual 
sky. It is to solemnise the happiness of piety, 
and to keep before us (though not always) 
the awful and constant price of our salvation. 
It is to awe the moral imagination no less 
than banish the sinner’s fear. It is to pro- 
duce in our faith reverence no less than 
affection, and majesty no less than trust. It 
is to rescue the idea of royalty from the 
vulgarity of courtiers and chroniclers, and 
restore us the Bible idea of a king as a judge 
who reigns in righteousness. It is to make 
speech of holiness as welcome as speech of 
love is now. It is to give the religious affec- 
tions an ethical foundation and an eternal 
power. Much current religion has tenderness 
but not greatness, kindness but not atmosphere, 
and taste but not faith. It has not the air of 
the spiritual world, and therefore not its 


Me PD 
vse 
% 
a 
& 

ek 


76 FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION ~ 


authority. Tt touches us, but it does not quell 
us or rule us. Pe asks the preacher to move 
us, but not to confound us. It It makes men men 
“generous oftener than it makes them humble. 
It moves individuals, but it does not lay a spell 
on society either of fear or love. It has 
warmth, but not spiritual penetration or search- 
ing grasp. It corrects our selfishness, but it 
does not destroy our egotism. We can be much 
too kind to human nature for the gospel it 
needs. Give George MacDonald a well-earned 
rest, and take up your Pascal. The gospel can 
be ineffective because it is not incisive enough, 
not unsparing enough, not real enough to face 
us, not deep enough to trawl the foul bed of 
the soul. It may lack the conquering note of 
passion, the last trump of judgment, conviction, 
and glorious fear. We may not realise that 
the sin from which we are saved is a thing 
most damnable, and we may forget that, by the 
judgment of God’s holy love on our Redeemer, 
it is not only subdued, but (I speak with awe) 
it 7s damned—for ever. 

Is this theology? Then theology it must be. 
It only means that it is upon some kind of a 
theology that a Church must live. An indi- 
‘vidual may get on with mere religion, but a 
| Church must have dogma. Our Congregational 


FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 77 


Union is not a Church, but a chief source of 
its present difficulty is this, that the indepen- 
dency of the Churches is at once unqualified 
and unkindled by that common grasp of (even 
a revised) dogma which gave our fathers a base 
for so much individual liberty. According to 
such faith it will be unto us. I speak of us 
in our collective work and Free Church witness. 
If our faith lack something central to the Cross, 
our bearing in the world cannot but lack what 
overcomes the world and insures our place and 
dignity. The Cross is (1) the holy act of grace 
and revelation through Christ to us; (2) the 
act of judgment on Christ for the world; 
(3) the act of judgment by Christ on the world ; 
so that the judgment He bore becomes the Be 
judgment He wields. To lose one of these is to 
maim the gospel and reduce its effect. Without 
the note of judgment in the Cross the Church 
loses the note of moral realism in its faith, 
and the skill of moral insight and moral remedy 
for the world. It will make a great practical | 
difference whether the sacrifice we find in the | 
Cross is only a revelation of God's heart or 
also the exercise of His holy doom. It is this 
last that is dropping from sight and use to- 
day; and there goes with it our Church power 
and our moral weight. The moral task of 


Le, ae 
om 


Tr 


78 FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 


the Christian life in the face of evil is set 
not by love, but by love in judgment. And 
our inspiration is not a love that shall judge 
the world, but one that has judged it, and 
made our tenderest message both solemn and 


sure. What is the Church but the great apostle © 


and preacher on earth? And what is preaching 
but speaking with authority? And what is 
authority if it do not carry behind its claim 
this word of judgment, and create a new and 
sure responsibility for those who hear? It is 
no authority which demands what it does not 
enforce. And for a Church authority does not 
exist except her word is of a Christ who judges 
because He was judged. The Churches which 


hold to that faith, however they may miscon- — 


ceive it, are the Churches which have, and will 
have, authority. Authority always goes with 
the power and commandment effectually to for- 
give, which cannot be without the judgment 
note. 

We of the Free Churches at least have 
nothing but the authority of this faith to stand 
upon for our public place. We have no right 
to our schism and our Church freedom except 
what is created by the kind of direct forgive- 
ness that gave us our soul’s freedom. If this 
faith suffer our ground gives way. And our 


FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 79 


faith must suffer—that is my plea—if our love 
be not formed on grace and made effective by 
judgment, and if judgment be not established 
once and for all in the death of Christ. That is — 
the Church’s one foundation. I fear we have in 

many cases lost the sense of a Church. Some 
of our Churches are but gatherings; or they 
are Churches of mere moderates that would 
never have led to the Church being called 
holy, or its spirit either. And I ask myself if 
this be a symptom of having lost or lamed 
that element of forgiving judgment in the 
Cross which created the Church and is its 
evangelical foundation always. It is just the 
frame of mind that would prevail in a Church 
with only one foot on the rock. Some restless 
Churches evidently do not stand on it; their 


out of the fact that Christ died for our sins 
and rose for our justification. He died because 
“we had sinned, and rose again because He 
had justified us, and judged the world in its 
Prince. We are suffering from an undogmatic 
Christianity, especially as to the Cross, which 
is not apostolic faith, and will not carry an 
apostolic Church. No half-gospel will really 
affect the age. The age will like it because it 
interests the age—and lets it alone. We are 


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i * * +o 
ss 
f 


80 FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION | 


in danger of moving the centre of gravity to 
Christ’s life and teaching—as if we believed 
Christ for His doctrine instead of His doctrine 
for Christ—as if the Gospels were the brief 
history of His soul instead of the long history 
of His passion. There is some risk of an affec- 
tation: of thought in this; and the effect of un- 
reality from it in our Churches is sure, subtle, and 
fatal; and it is just what some of our Churches 
show. It was the atoning death of Christ that 
founded the Church; it was no ordinance of 


-His life, or injunction of His teaching. We 
have no account of His founding a Church by 


any precept or programme. The only established 
Church is the Church inevitably established by 
the free-will offering of Christ on the Cross as 
a redemption from curse and a judgment of sin 
in the flesh. The Church’s one foundation is 


\ Christ crucified, and risen, and bringing forth 


‘judgment unto love’s victory. To lose that 


element in faith is to dissolve any Church in 
due time. 

Let us keep in our faith, at any cost to 
popularity, the virile note, the ethical note, 
the tragic note, the trump of doom, and the 
note of power. Let us add to our sympathy 
and benevolence the deeper sense of sin, 
sanctity, and judgment. These are not theo- 


FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 81 


logical but religious ideas, and they must 
come to their own in our current piety. It is 
not a revised theology we need, so much as a 
renewed faith, renewed not in its fervour so 
much as in the spirit of its mind. Itis not a 
question of orthodox or liberal, nor one of 
individual piety. It is not the form or the 
fervour of belief that is involved, but a type of 
common faith and catholic godliness. It is 
not zeal, devotion, or energy that is lacking. 
We need a mode of piety tuned to the New 
Testament key and inspired from the real 
New Testament source. Our theologians may, 
and must, revise crude theories, which impede 
our message, about substitution, satisfaction, 
miracle, the Bible, or the wrath of God; but 
we have not the style and freedom to deal with 
these secondary theological questions till we 
are rooted in the one article of an experienced 
Redemption. The room that theology needs 
is not the liberty of science, but of salvation. 
It broadens by free grace more than by free 
thought. It is not really the theology of the 
Cross that makes it unwelcome. It is its 
sanctity, its judgment, and its demand—faith’s 
personal exaction of a broken will. Mitis depone 
collem. Itis not the mystery of the Cross that 
men stumble at, but its offence. It suffers not 
Missions * 


hg 
82 FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION — 


from men’s doubt, but from their resentment of 
claims which are all too clear. It is fatal to be 
shy of this side of the gospel, shy of the Cross 
which annuls the curse, and of the judgment 
note which deepens the word of grace. It 
is fruitless to try to heal the soul without 
lifting its load. We cannot solve its riddles 
while we ignore its guilt. The gospel comes 
to the world not as its solution but as its 
salvation. And it comes as its judgment before 
it comes as its balm. It is as ineffectual to 
preach pardon without expiation as it is to 
preach pagan theories of expiation. It is 
feckless to trust to Christian persuasions or 
pities which leave all parties dull to the terror 
of the Lord. There is a type of love that does 
not cast out fear because it never allowed it to 
come in. Its wisdom does not begin in fear. 
But the thought of judgment, come or coming, 
is both a comfort, a tonic, and a moral stay. The 
larger hope, for instance, is a Christian hope, 
but does it never enfeeble the solemnity both 
of grace and faith, and strip the awe from our 
joy and peace? May it not go with a type 
of religion which slackens our warfare, robs 
us of power, saps our Christian virility, and 
sinks us in the respect of the foes we have 
to confront? We cease to be feared when we 


FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 83 


cease to fear, and when our faith knows no 
wrestling we lose the spirit of fight, and hang 
back in the Lord’s controversy. And a like 
result flows from the doctrine of evolution. 
There is no idea more dominant for recent 
years than that of evolution, and our preachers 
are much concerned often to place themselves 
in line with it. And very ably it is done. But 
there are many cases where the attempt only 
shows how they miss the gospel note. The 
congruity of evolution with Genesis is neither 
here nor there. It is a burnt-out question. 
But what is its moral and practical tendency ? 
What is its effect on those who make it a 
dogma? I believe it is dangerous to the gospel 
of grace, conversion, and to that daily vigilance 
which keeps our obedience real and makes our 
election sure. Evolution becomes the unfolding 


of a Divine Immanence and not the coming of | 


a Divine Redeemer. It bids us give free course 


to the highest that is in us, instead of being’ 


converted and turning to the Rock that is 
higher than we. It is attractive to the imagina- 
tion and interesting for thought. But what 
the soul needs is nothing of the kind, else 
culture would be religion enough. The soul 
needs not a development from within, but 
a rescue from without ; not the erasure of evil, 


84 FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION — 


but its judgment. Salvation is not the soul’s 
inspiration from its own rich depths, but its 
total obligation to grace most high. The soul 
needs, more than anything, one standing over 
it, measuring it, judging it, destroying its 
enemy and saving it for a_new order of life. 
It needs an authority over it and in it, which 
no part (or even the whole) of an evolving 
system has any claim to wield over another 


part. And the popular unconscious effect of 
a spiritual atmosphere saturated with the 
_idea of evolution is to rob us of authority 
because it impairs responsibility, weakens a 
| sense of judgment, and nurses self-sufficiency, 
or reliance on_a vague drift of things. It 
sets you in a Divine process instead of at a 
Divine bar. It makes peace with science, but 
it is fatal to duty, effort, seriousness, and 
reality of life. It saps the gospel power, strips 
the word of authority, empties life of its 
crucial decisions, and therefore lowers life. It 
makes the preacher teach truth more than 
grace, and state a case when he should plead 
a cause, make a demand, or beseech as though 
Christ besought. It turns apostles into scribes 
and makes the Church a school. And the 
world applauds because it is interested and— 
let alone. 


. > ns 


FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 85 


These and such influences tend to turn us 
from a faith which is passionate through 
conflict, to a faith which is amiably at home 
and at peace with its world. We are not in 
the least pilgrims and sojourners. We cease 
to wrestle and we unlearn much of the power 
to pray. And if we know too little of such 
prayer the loss is reflected in our loss of respect 
from man, even from our foes. 

In England, for instance, we have received 
an assault for which we were quite unprepared ; 
and we are just rallying from the blow. I 
refer, of course, to the Education Bill (1902). 
What is it in us that has made such an 
assault possible? How came they to dare 
it? What has made our enemy think it could 
be risked, with half the worshippers in the 
land on our rolls? Have we lost something 
which should have arrested such wickedness 
in a sister Church and saved her from such 
an iniquity were it so as by fear? 

Brethren, if the note of battle and judgment 
go out of our faith the stroke of judgment must 
sting our experience. Let us not despise the 
chastening of the Lord nor faint in this rebuke. 
Of course we shall not faint. Of course we 
shall not submit to a wrong inflicted by the 
prince of this world. But equally of course I 


86 FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 


hope we shall examine ourselves at God's bar, 
as on the eve of the battle good men do. Is 
this calamity also nemesis? Have we some- 
where forsaken the Lord and lamed the Cross? 
While we cherished His pity have we come 
short -of His grace? I speak of our type of 
faith, not of individual piety. Have we ignored 
His judgment as we dwelt on His love? Are 
we afraid, if we preach the judgment in the 
Cross, of scaring men? Does His reproof now 
break any hearts, or His cause make enough 
martyrs? Have we lost the Lord of Hosts in 
a mild Prince of Peace? Have we declined on 
an easy salvation and neglected the Lord’s con- 
. troversy? We are “scarcely saved”; have we 
felt lightly saved and taken our mercy as a 
thing of course? And is it therefore that we 
are given into the enemy’s hands, slack and 
asleep? I hope this judgment will come with 
the sound of a trump. I hope it will stir and 
gather us, and brace and harden us; I hope it 
will rouse us to make inquisition far beyond 
this one conflict. We can make it the greatest 
blessing all round. I hope it may do something 
to restore to our religion that breath of battle 
which blows from the depths of the Cross, that 
power, seriousness, and dignity which are so 
easily lost in an age of sentiment and sympathy. 


a 
~— a. 


FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 87 


We can die of dignity I know. But the Saviour 


died for a dignity and with a dignity He never 
lost. There is no doubt we can fight; can we 
cultivate a faith which fights for us and is a 
fire before us to compel respect and distance? 
Thank God that we have come to a more 
kindly and helpful age; but heart will never 
do the work of conscience, nor benevolence of 
principle. A general charity is not the love of 
Christ. A minimum creed is not the condi- 
tion of Christian unity. To be , undenominational 
is to be futile. And to have no particular 
Church is only to become the prey of those who 
have nothing but a Church. Why is the open 
heart so often justice-blind? Is it because it is 
opened genially by nature and not solemnly 
by the judgment Cross? Is it also because an 
evil system perverts a good will? There is 
no Divine charity but gives justice its due. 
That is true for faith and true for practice. 
It is the principle of the Cross and the 
principle of the State. The gospel is not 
peace and goodwill among men, but peace 
among men of good will. And the human 
charities grow in the clefts of God’s gracious 
judgments, which are like great mountains. 
It might be to the good of the kingdom of God 
if our charity toward men had to stand still a 


J yo ees > 
+ 


88 FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION — 


little, while we regain that justice which springs ~ 
from the justice of God. Were there more 
justice we should need less charity, and less of 
what apes charity. Have we escaped from the 
severity of the theologians only to succumb to 
the spell of the philosopher and the philan- 
thropist? Itis a poor exchange. Have we lost 
concern for principle because we want peace or 
subscriptions? That is ill well-doing. There is 
no guarantee in the mere spirit of charity that 
God shall be our glory and righteousness our 
pride. There is no security that wrong shall 
not be done, freedom lost, and the holy war die 
down. Charity can buy votes for a pet iniquity; 
and the plea for it can become a courteous 
affectation in men whose convictions are easy for 
lack of moral understanding. The Church Times . 
says, “Dissenters can never have the stamp 
of the gentleman because they cannot by their 
principles be other than censorious.” So! the 
toad must not say to the harrow, “I have no 
need of thee.” We are all taught of God that 
the love which keeps Israel is a judgment that 
neither slumbers nor sleeps till it have brought 
forth righteousness unto truth. There is no 
safety in a sentimental or churchly piety against 
those subtle and plausible abuses which need 
sanctity to discern their unholy drift and faith 


7? 
2 


FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 89 


to storm their hoary walls. Have we that sense 
of Christ which gives us a true instinct of the 
real Anti-christ, a true courage in its face, and 
a true method to meet it? Has our faith in 
Christ lost belief in a prince of this world, 
dying, but desperate and dangerous? 

Are the critics just who ask if our public 
word has still its ancient power? Does every 
form of denunciation we use increase the real 
weight of our moral rebuke? On the other 
hand, does religion with us tend at all to a 
subdued and affable type which is feeble in 
public effect, and may be fatal to our public 
work and principle? There is a brotherliness 
and liberality which does nothing but give an 
opening to the resolute enemy. The charm of 
Christ can be made to veil the offence of the 
Cross. The winsome Son of Man may hide the 
Christ who was made at once a curse for us 
and Judge of all the earth. The pulpit poet 
serves us ill if he ousts the apostle. What shall 
it profit us to crown our Petrarch with bays 
while Savonarola’s soul goes out in fire? Has 
the doctrine of the living Christ never obscured 
the doctrine of the Holy Ghost, or quenched 
the tongue of fire? Does the doctrine of the 
Holy Ghost, on the other hand, never lose 
itself in the sand of subjective sinlessness at 


90 FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION . 


the cost of public righteousness and historie 
judgment ? 

In politics it is often asked, What is really 
wrong with us? What, for instance, is wrong 
with the party for which our principles have 
done so much more than it does for our 
principles? Distinguished writers like Mr. 
Kidd lament the degradation of the principles 
of modern Liberalism by its separation from 
ethical and religious inspiration. Can it be lack 
of faith, of positive religion, that is the matter ? 
I am not sure that the other party has not for 
the moment a religious earnestness which ours 
has not. At least it has the support, not to say 
guidance, of men who are in frank and deadly 
earnest about their religion, such as it is, and 
who understand it, and put no other issue in 
competition with it. 

Mr. Gladstone did not like Nonconformity. 
But he understood it. Have we now men lead- 
ing our own side of politics who do not under- 
stand our case, who do not care to understand 
it, and at heart regard us as diplomatists regard 
missionaries, as troublesome zealots? It need 
not be strange that they should. If they do not 
hear the music we hear, the dance we lead them 
must seem absurd. But we have a holier word 
than the State, and a holier trust ‘than even_ 


FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 91 


education. We are at one with the High 
—eer 


Churchman in that, if we know ourselves. We 
have a trust more sacred than either the nation 
or the child, more than culture or freedom. If 
we know it, we have that which emancipates 
those whom freedom cannot release. We have 
the free gospel and the kind of Church that 
a free gospel makes. That means more for 
human liberty than any party programme or 
public cry. I confess that nothing would justify 
our course at present, or the extremer course 


_ we may be driven to, but an attack by the State 


upon our Church. It is for us an attack by the 
prince of this world on the principle of the 
Cross which formed the Church, the prerogative 
of Christ of which, for this land, we are trustees. 
Every attempt to establish the Church saps the 
Cross. You will never establish the Cross with- 
out disestablishing the Church. I am cautious 
about politics in preaching. But when it comes 
to this I do not hesitate. This is a political issue 
which involves the Church’s pulpits. The spirit 
that would capture our schools would close our 


Pp ulpits, as it denies our Church. But with 


many of us conscience has gone sleepy, through 
enlargement of the heart. We want to be’ 
friendly all round. We fumble with an un- \ 
sectarian Christianity doomed to be sterile. 


yo Ce, Ses Le 
Daler ii ee 
yaa 


12 


92 FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 


We forget that we are an apostolic Church, and 
that for an apostle the friendship of the world 
is enmity with God. Multitudes of the good 
care nothing for principles compared with 
pieties, schemes, funds, and numbers. They are 
not interested in freedom, but in conventional 
philanthropies. Recently I read a complaint 
from a large County Union that they were 
not getting the young into the Churches, and 
‘ that, too, while the Churches were going to 
_ unheard-of lengths in providing cricket, football, 
draughts and dominoes, dancing classes, and 
-pierrot troupes. I agree with the protests made 
on the occasion, and should say that that was 
just the way not to fill churches, except with 
burdens. Speak to a suburban Church, for 
instance, about the nature of the Free Church 
or its ministry as founded in the principle of the 
gospel, and you are met by mute bewilderment. 
There was nothing touching in the address, 
forsooth! These people live on religious tea. 
Do we live under a sense of judgment? Have 
we any self-examination of a stern kind? Do 
we not abound in religious people without a soul- 
history, whose spiritual world at sixty is much 
what it was at twenty, if it continues to exist. - 
Be sure that no sympathy, benevolence, or 
altruism will make good what we must lose in 


FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 93 


renouncing the advantage of organisation. Only 
a faith can which goes so deep into its own 
moral source as to link us with the last authority 
of the real world. Are we indeed making men as 
we claim our creed does? Let us be plain about 
this. No man of sense or sympathy will accuse 
me of heartlessness. But if they can they must. 
I would not arrest a single gift, lame a single 
kind effort, or discourage a single sacrifice. 
But, my dear brethren, brotherliness is not the 
gospel it has come to be called. Kindness, 


sacrifice, and doing good are not Christianity. 
They are of it, but they are not it. And it is 
healthier on the whole to be asking, “ What 
must I do to be saved?” than “Do I love and 
help Jesus?” Well-doing is an expression of 
the Church, but evangelical faith is the Church’s 
life. Has our well-doing outrun the vital faith 
which carries it? 

If I am not wrong the source of our difficulty 
is deeper than the mere critic can diagnose. If 
I were only a critic I should not see it. Our 
political situation is but one symptom of a state 
of things which needs more than remedy. It 
needs something in the nature of revival, and 
perhaps regeneration. I am not speaking of 
anything, I repeat, so much as of Churches. I 
am speaking, under great qualifications, of the 


» a ah, Se Ao 
Tn bs rok) ay 
) apie Se 7 


94 FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION — 


religious mind and frame of our Churches. I 
am comparing it with the New Testament type. 


Are there not too many who both lightly feel ~ 


and lightly heal our wound? Are there enough 
who are taught by the unsparing Cross to speak 
the piercing word and press the searching spirit ? 


Religion can do too much to deepen the self- | 


complacency which is so natural to man and 
so national to the Englishman. We may be 
hardened by the Church as we are not by the 
world, and lulled into a self-satisfaction which 
becomes too tough at last for the very sword of 
God. The suggestions made by some at the 
present crisis do but scratch the soil that needs 
ploughing deep. It is only spasmodic to urge a 
new vigour in the Liberationist cause. Vigour 
for such work does not come at command. It 
has to be deep planted, well watered, and long 
reared. If we are slack, then, it is not our mood 
alone that is at fault, but our morale. Our 
religion is in danger of following a type which 
lays no Church principle of necessity upon us. 
It is too easily happy with either a free Church 
or a bond, if only the current forms of good 
are done, or some vicious wrong set right. We 
are reminded that we have invited this attack 
on our principles because we have been too 
quiescent. But why have we been so? Because 


iS SE 


FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 95 


our type of faith has encouraged it. Because 
our Church position is not religious enough ; 
it is not a direct part and implicate of our faith ; 
it is too political to be preached about (and it 
should be preached); because we are not com- 
pelled to be Free Churchmen by what makes 
us Christians; because our Free Church is not 
rooted in what frees our soul. A relaxed sense 
of the cost of our soul’s freedom to Christ must 
mean a reduced sense of the value of freedom in 
the Church and a slacker duty in its service. 
We are in danger of losing in trivial well-doing 
—some Churches have quite lost it—the mass 
and range of Puritan conviction, and the verve 
and volume of New Testament faith. 

Nothing gives some of us more concern than 
the position of our Missions — the Colonial 
Society and especially the London Missionary 
Society. It attracts serious notice even abroad. 
I find in one of the most recent and able foreign 
books on Missions puzzled reference to the 
prolonged embarrassment and depression of the 
Congregational Society and a regretful contrast 
with its great past. The recent appeal of its 
Treasurer for plain speaking from the Churches 
has produced in the Hxaminer a correspondence 
which has been, with few exceptions, so slight 
and superficial as only to increase the uneasi- 


96 FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 


ness, and furnish another index of the frame of 
mind at the root of the mischief. It evinced no 
real insight into the larger and deeper situation 
and no grasp of the spiritual case. We are 
more alive to our ills than to their source. We 
feel the bullets but we do not see the foe. We 
are well served with prophets and ideals. I 
wish we had more of those who could translate 
them into schemes. How is it we have not 
reared, attracted, or kept such men? But our 
need is something beyond either ideas or 
schemes. The state of our missionary zeal is 
always a true index of the New Testament 
quality of our faith. For the New Testament is 
the great missionary manual more than it is 
anything else. Nothing will set our Missions 
right which does not set right much besides. 
What would put the Missionary Society on its 
feet would solve the problem of the Congrega- 
tional Union and our colleges. The trouble is in 
the Churches, and their type of faith, and its 


*. order of attraction. Is our creed growing and 


keeping men? Is it producing intellectual and 
moral fibre? Is Congregationalism capable of 
missionary work, of extension work? Did our 
missionary inspiration cease with the doctrine 
of an endless hell for the heathen? When that 
went did it carry with it all we found in a 


FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 97 


doctrine of judgment? Was it only a judgment 
for the inferior races? Is it not a worse 
judgment not to preach the gospel than never 
to have heard it? How is it that we are not 
compelled to missionise if only to deliver our 
own souls? 

Is it not new grasp of the moral reality of 
the Cross that we need? We feel too much 
below our work. I am not sure that we seize 
the problem. We do not rise to the great 
hour’s most spiritual call. Is it not apostles 
we need first and most? Not merely the 
apostles who can make attractive sermons, 
but those that are palpably made, in spite 
of themselves, by the gospel, who can fill 
us with more sense of God’s grace than of 
human wrongs or needs. Not merely men with 
apostolic fervour, the taste for sanctity, and 
human feeling. That is too subjective. And 
we have such men. But men with an apostolic 
gospel, which is objective, which is the power 
and makes the power—and the kind of power 
we need—men to force us anew, not upon the 
Cross merely, but upon that in the Cross which 
harrows hell, strikes at Satan’s seat, deals 
with final moral reality, settles for good the 
whole human case, and breaks up at once the 
prince of the world and the fountains of our 


Missions 8 


ne iy, 
“+e 

; 

j 


98 FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 


soul’s great deep. We feel the sentiment of 
the gospel freely; I wish we felt as fully the 
eternal judgment in it which makes it Divine 
grace. Back to Christ is what we need. Yes, 
but to the whole New Testament Christ and 
the whole New Testament Cross. We believe in 
that gospel, but have we its own freedom in 
handling it? Has it become central to our 
creed without being central to our religion and 
our practice? Has our actual piety lost the 
scriptural compass, perspective, and proportion? 
Do we take the gospel for granted and pass on? 
We keep it in lavender, perhaps. We have it 
in reserve, perhaps, but we do not call it up. 
Some are preoccupied with outpost work. They 
are scattered in skirmishes. Our little Societies 
drain the interest from our Churches. Our 
forces are too spread and wasted with excur- 
sions and alarms. There is danger of losing 
the gospel amid its applications and apercus. 
It is time to call out our spiritual reserves and 
work our crucial texts. The hour is critical 
with us. We must draw upon the great war 
fund—if we have still among us an authority 
that can open the chest, if we have a prophet 
with a rod to strike the rock. Let the true 
gospel accumulate in our moral experience and 
it will break its own way out into applications. 


FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 99 


Is our faith a passion? Nothing is so ingenious 
and fertile in schemes as aruling passion. It is 
both wisdom and power. For faith works itself 
out in love; but love does not always work by 
faith. Faith fed at the true Cross works out 
into love, but there is a love that carries us 
away from the Cross. There is a pity that 
blinds us to the work done there, and to the 
judgment that goes out from it in the power 
of the Holy Ghost. If we resumed our private 
use of the Bible we should soon find whether 
we had lost its perspective and its tone. Were 
the awful fulness of the Cross the reality to us 
that it is to Christ His power would be ours. 
Nay, were it to us Protestants the near and 
intimate concern that the Pope is to the Roman- 
ists, or even their Church to Anglicans, nothing 
could resist us and few things annoy. 

Let us think less of revising the Cross, and 
give it its way to revise us. I doubt if increased 
prayer is a sufficient remedy. We seem to need 
a gospel that stirs prayer, and puts urgency and 
prevalence into it, and is over us always as a 
shaping power of responsibility, inspiration, and 
rebuke. We need to dwell longer and deeper 
on what God has done, borne, and given in the 
erisis of the Cross. We need for life’s leading 
power a personal piety which is continually 


ata 


100 FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 


schooled there, humbled and tempered to the 
peace which comes by war and the righteousness 
which is by judgment. The zeal of principle, 
the thirst of righteousness, and the passion of 
holiness can only live by a faith which finds in 
the Cross the focus of moral reality, the holiness 
of God grappling in final judgment with the 
last reality of man’s moral case. God’s love to 
us is not distinguished by this, that He first 
loved us, loves us tenderly, and loves us to the 
last. Were it no more than that it might be 
as ineffectual as so much of our true love is. 
Herein is love, not that God loved us but that 
His love measured the moral need and loved 
us unto atonement. Why do we break away 
in the middle of that verse? Love to a sinful 
world is not holy without atonement. And 
what is atonement if it be no more than sacri- 
fice? How shall we know that it is effectual 
sacrifice, that it is not the blind and wasted 
force which the sacrifices of so many loving 
people are? The power of the Atonement 
is that it is sacrifice relevant to sin, God’s 
own sacrifice to His own holiness, God’s own 
endurance of His own judgment, and His de- 
struction of His last enemy. Neither love nor 
sacrifice is enough for the powers we need 
unless it meet and glorify God’s holy judgment. 


FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 101 


To be joined with that is repentance, and to 
triumph in that is faith, and its reign is the 
kingdom of God. For our renewal of power 
we need a renewal of faith in the Cross as the 
act and centre of judgment, the fountain of 
grace, the foundation of the Church, the con- 
science of conscience, the life of ethic, and the 
secret and method of the social future. 
Throughout the Bible the kingdom of God is 
not an achievement of man but a gift of God. 
It is not a community apart like the Church; 
it is a state of society. It is not a special 
society that men form, nor a social programme 
they frame, but an authority, a kingship, that 
God hath set up—really set up, and not merely 
published. There is another Bible principle, even 
in the Old Testament, that the kingdom could 
only be set up by an act of judgment—not by 
mere proclamation, but by effectual vindication. 
Well, it is set up, by God’s grace, in the judgment 
death of Christ. That is our gospel. It is not 
the kingdom we have first to preach and scheme 
for. No preaching or device of ours can set the 
kingdom up. It is not set up; it comes down— 
out of heaven from God. It is not reform, it 
is salvation. What we have to preach first and 
keep first is something that God has done, not 
that we may do. When we preach that gospel 


102 FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 


with its native power it will produce in us its 
own effect, and compel us to show forth the 
kingdom that faith and repentance have made 
within. If we see to the gospel the gospel will 
see to the kingdom. 

I cannot tell you the rest, the comfort, and 
the power of that faith in a day like this. To 
realise that we have not to set up the kingdom 
but to take home God’s own establishment of it, 
is to escape from the burden, not only of an 
Established Church, but of a world far too heavy 
for our best efforts to raise. We are distracted 
by the many schemes for good, which are some- 
times the devices of despair rather than the fruit 
of faith. We are disheartened at the failure 
of the partial panaceas that appear like false 
messiahs and draw after them so many. We 
are weary of the slow coming of a better time, 
and the rectification of all things. What peace 
and power it is then to realise that the prince 
of this world is judged already, that the Lord 
our Redeemer reigneth, that the kingship of 
God is already fixed in its everlasting seat. The 
Cross is that judgment throne; its victory is 
our sphere; and the grace of it is our gospel 
and our charge. For the supreme sake of the 
kingdom of God let us pay more attention to 
the gospel than to the kingdom. It is through 


FINAL JUDGMENT FULL SALVATION 103 


the Church of the judged and saved that the 
kingdom comes. Let the kingdom be what the 
true Church makes it. But let the Church be 
what the gospel makes it rather than what our 
dreams of a millennium seem to require. The 
gospel is our business, the kingdom is the Lord’s. 
We thought we were charged with both, and 
it is more than we can bear. It is the gospel 
that is put into our hands. “Go, preach it to 
every creature.” We were not charged with the 
kingdom. Ours is the gospel, the Spirit, the 
Church, but His is the kingdom, the power 
and glory for ever. I rejoice that the air is 
full of the kingdom. It means now, as when 
Christ came, that the King is not far off. If we 
feel the kingdom is at hand, it is because the 
King is preaching it. And the more we feel 
the spirit of the kingdom, the more we shall 
be made to feel how necessary to bring it in 
the King is whose judgment set it up. 

It is a time of immense peril, therefore it is 
for faith a time of endless promise and hope. 
A time of purgation, perhaps, but a time of 
endless promise and of hope in the Lord. 


SOME CAUSES OF MISSIONARY APATHY 


N many sides the societies complain that the 
Christian public does not support mission- 

ary work as it deserves. The heroic missionary 
ardour has paled in the public imagination, and 
something like a system of moral coercion is 
too necessary to flog up the enthusiasm and 
bring in the supplies. I do not say the societies 
are wrong in this, but something is wrong some- 
where. And one is the more disposed to criti- 
cise from the feeling that an idea so grand, so 
captivating, as the missionary idea, is calculated, 
if set forth in its intrinsic worth, to kindle men 
of itself, and wake them to that readiness of 
support never denied to a cause which touches 
the public imagination and conscience combined. 
Nor can I help when I listen to rebukes which 
reproach the Churches with not prizing their 
Christ enough because the missionary societies 
lack support—I cannot help in such cases feeling 


that perhaps it is not rebuke, however gentle, 
107 


108 SOME CAUSES OF 


that is the main thing required. Rebuke is a 
weapon to be:very sparingly used, the more that 
it is so ready to offer itself. It were better in 
dealing with reasonable and Christian people to 
consider the situation and if possible discover 
the causes which lead to the result deplored. It 
may be found then either that the causes are 
removable, or that they disclose a state of 
things not wholly lamentable from the largest 
Christian point of view, however unfavourable 
to the particular agencies at any particular time 
at work in Christ’s name. I think, too, that, in 
pleading for missionary support as I am, it is 
both wise and respectful to take the public into 
confidence, to be perfectly frank as to the situ- 
ation, to avoid the air of coaxing, and the 
suspicion of withholding the seamy side from 
view. It is far better to admit weakness, and 
invite help to resist it, than to produce an 
impression of lack of candour. I would not 
be an advocate but a physician. The case has 
more to gain from an honest diagnosis than 
from diplomatic reserves. 

Let us, then, first recognise the comparative 
apathy of even the Christian public in the 
matter of missions, and let me suggest what 
seem to me to be among its causes. I do not 
say they are justifications, only causes which 


MISSIONARY APATHY 109 


our judgment must weigh as they deserve, and 
remove where possible. 


I 


First of all, there is the dislike of the public 
at large, and especially of the monied public, 
for religion which is very much in earnest. 
Your confessed man of the world hates a man 
who is just as distinctly not of this world, and 
who is aggressively so. The modern paganism, 
like the old, resents the intrusion of Christ upon 
its self-indulgent life. And the man of very 
superior culture, whose faith in civilisation 
amounts to a superstition fascinating to all 
lovers of irony, such a man despises, as the 
old pagan élite used to do, an agency that is so 
potent with the popular heart as Christianity, 
and so revolutionary in some of its results. 
Your merely commercial man, again, resents 
any influence which rouses in those he calls the 
“niggers” a self-respect and intelligence which 
make it more difficult for him to use them and 
then turn them adrift. A great mass of f people 
- this Christian country ar are totally ur unaffected 


in their conscious life by by Christianity. It has 
affected only their unconscious and inherited 
habits, and the usages of a society which they 


110 SOME CAUSES OF 


indolently worship. But they are at heart quite 
alien to the specific personal influence of Chris- 
tianity, which alienation is always ready to 
break into open contempt and hostility. What 
is known as the forward policy, the military 
party in the State, has sometimes a deep 
aversion to the missionaries, who suffer more 
than most from it, and who raise, as in the 
case of Colenso, the chief protest against it. 


II 


Secondly, the e unparalleled anarchy of opinion 
in t the e general public _on_religious matters is— 
a powerful. cause of declining missionary zeal. 
The great missionary age of the Church was 
when Europe had the one Catholic and Apostolic 
Church of Rome, as yet unenriched by the 
splendid variety of modern life and thought, but 
also unweakened in the force of its blows on 
any particular point it might select. It is easy 
to see how this distraught condition of the 
public mind in the matter of belief should 
affect the ardour of Christian effort, and stop 
the supply of the best men for missionary work. 
The educated are unsettled. The societies com- 
plain that ‘they a are > forced to take a low 
quality of missionary far oftener than they 


’ on. 


MISSIONARY APATHY 111 


wish, just because there is so little range of 
choice, and they must take inferior men or none. 
You will remember, too, that last century, which 
saw the origin of the great Protestant mis- 
sionary societies, was an age of great uniformity 


of belief. The Calvinistic creed of those bodies 


where missions arose was a unity, whose seam- 
less robe was hardly rent by any of the questions 
rained upon it since from the mitrailleuse of 
this century’s thought. Even among the 
religious, the present age is an age rather of 
mild breadth than of the intensity needed to 
keep distant missions alive. This leads to our 
third point. 


III 


There has taken place a great change in 
Christianity itself. Not only is the world out- 
side in a state of religious anarchy, but Christian 
belief is in a state of transition. We are crossing 
a stream about whose bottom we are not always 
quite sure, and whose force is prodigious. We 
have too much ado to keep our own seat in the 
saddle, and our own steed on his feet, to be as 
free as we should like to give thought and help 
to others. This is a temporary state of things, 
but when it passes missionary effort will rest on 


112 SOME CAUSES OF 


a somewhat different basis from that on which 
it rested when it began. We have lost, for 
example, that sure faith which made the great 
missionaries of last century, and indeed, of the 
early and medizeval and Romish Church, so 
earnest and so powerful, that sure faith in a 
decisive. choice and in an endless hell. Even . 
when that future is not denied it is not held — 
or asserted with the same passionate fervour 
as once. And especially it is impossible to 
believe that eternal burnings are reserved for 
the heathen who have never heard the gospel. 
We must go out now, not so much to pluck 
brands from hell fire, but, in the name of love 
and progress, to bestow on the dark races a gift 
higher and nobler than any creed of theirs—the 
gift of Christ and His love. We do not say 
they will be damned if they do not believe, but 
we do say they will be blessed if they do. If 
they do not believe, much of the condemnation 
will be ours. 

Again, we have learned to regard their 
religions differently. They have a certain 
divine and even revelationary value. Our 
instructed missionaries do not attack the pagan 
religions (like the first Christians and the first 
missionaries) as inventions of the devil. It will 
be a long time before missions recover from 


eee: 


MISSIONARY APATHY 113 


that most lamentable and ignorant policy, which 
marred and discounted the work of some classic 
missionary names. The science of comparative 
religion has given us new light on pagan 
religions. And a more catholic Christianity 
has recognised the light there as light from 
heaven. It views the pagan heroes and saviours 
‘as minor epiphanies of our own supreme and 
comprehensive Christ. But this is a tendency 
which runs to an absurd extreme when thin- 
minded people say that the pagan religions 
are quite good enough for the pagan peoples, 
because they are their own. Do the pagan 
peoples find it so? Or would the clothes in 
which these critics were born be good enough 
for them throughout their life? The coat of 
one’s own skin is an exquisite garment and 
one that fits well; why should we consent to 
wear another, or be indebted to the meddle- 
someness of those seniors of ours who prescribe 
upper garments, and even deny themselves 
much to provide and adorn them? 

Again, missionary work has come to be much 


more than it was,a matter of education and 


ned 
less_a_ matter of conversion. And we do not 


readily believe in education. It is always easier 


to rouse public enthusiasm of the tumultuous 
sort by the violent methods than by the slow, 
Missions 9 


114 SOME CAUSES OF 


steady, and abiding order of work. It has, 
however, been forced on missionaries them- 
selves, both by their experience and by the 
change in our view of Christianity, that educa- 
tional methods are in certain circumstances of 
as much value as the more striking, but really 
more precarious, means of sudden and decided 
conversion. But they show less. 

But educational methods are not peculiar to 
the Church only. It is a kind of work in which 
the State has a great, and will ever have a 
greater, share as distinct from the Church. And 
this leads me to the fourth explanation of 
missionary apathy. 


IV 


Slowly the Church and the societies have been 
losing their monopoly of Christian effort, and 
the function of the State in contact with inferior 
races has become more and more missionary. 
Christianity has reared a civilisation so far 
Christian, and direct missions have become but 
one form of our missionary agency and spirit. 
Christianity has had two great sides—the 
religious and the moral. And there are two 
great agencies for its spread, the Christian 
Church and the Christian State. This may be 


“= > 


a ee 


MISSIONARY APATHY 115 


said by the most convinced Dissenter. In India 
especially the action of the Christian State is 
becoming more and more missionary. We hold 
India for India’s sake, in the name of justice 
and benevolence. It is one of the most splendid 
triumphs of Christianity in the world—a race 
redeeming a race. It is one of the grandest 
replies you can make to one who asks, What 
is to become of England’s Christian influence 
and character when the Church is disestab- 
lished? The blessed influence of England on 
India has been quite apart from the work of 
the Church as established. Indeed, one of the 
great drawbacks to the influence of Christianity 
in India is the existence of that same Church 
there, forced on a conquered people who are 
obliged to support the officials of an alien faith. 

Society, I say, apart from Church organisation, 
has become more missionary in its sense of 
responsibility. It is a triumph of the Christian 
missionary spirit, and I welcome and claim it 
in that name. I would not be guilty of the un- 
fairness of saying that a man whose sympathies 
led him to this form of missionary action rather 
than the other was a man devoid of the mission- 
ary ardour of Christianity. Let each man select 
such mission field as is most congenial—social 
or religious, indirect or direct ; notwithstanding 


116 SOME CAUSES OF 


in every way Christ is preached, and in that I 
rejoice and will rejoice. The whole changing 
spirit of our English feeling to inferior races 
is a victory of the New Testament over the Old 
Testament, of the missionary spirit over the spirit 
of extermination on the one hand and of prose- 
lytism on the other. And the temporary with- 
drawal of enthusiasm from the missionary 
societies has partly gone to make us more than 
ever before a missionary nation. In several 
departments we find that religious energy is 
reduced not by its decay but by its deflection 
to social channels. And it is so far well. For 
with our tremendous foreign relations, if we 
are not missionary we are not Christian. If 
we are not missionary in our politics (in the 
sense I have named) we are not Christian in 
our heart and faith. 

And this leads me to mention a fifth cause of 
declining interest in missions. 


Vv 


Some of the Churches have been too ready 
to welcome and utilise the work of the sword. 
They do not take it in their hand, but they put 
it in somebody else’s hand in the hope of getting 
in by its means without its odium. It was a 


katie 


MISSIONARY APATHY 117 


gross mistake to make the free entrance of 
missionaries one of the concessions extorted 
after the Chinese War. And I shall never 
forget a reason given in my youth by Bishop 
Ellicott for voting for the Afghan War. He said 
it might be a means of getting Christianity and 
the Bible into Afghanistan. Nothing in truth 
has so much hampered our missionary success as 
the fact that we are a conquering people. We 
cannot expect our vanquished to love much the 
faith of their conquerors. The missions, the 
great and envied missions, of the early Church, 
which are said to have converted whole races, 
did not emerge from the priests of a conquering 
race or a military nation, but from that Catholic 
Church which was the binding, blessing, and 
pacific influence among the fighting nations. 
We have made the races we have touched long 
for our civilisation, but not for our religion. 
They envy our power; they have had little 
to draw them to our love. If it is not the 
men who are the backbone of India that we 
get as trophies of our missionary work, it is 
because the Indian patriots feel as if they 
would cease to be patriots if they took our 
religion ; and thus we get too many of another 
sort. We cannot convert Indians who could 
convert India. I do not call what we get 


118 SOME CAUSES OF 


worthless. That would be to denounce Indian 
missions. But we do not get the intellects 
the early Church got from the pagan world, 
and we do not get the people of influence— 
the kings, queens, and princes that made the 
missionary conquest of the South Sea Islands 
and Madagascar so comparatively easy. And 
one reason is that England in India has been 
better known by her sword and her factories 
than by her faith and love. These: are con- 
siderations which not only explain the slow 
progress of missions abroad but some of the 
alienation of some minds from them at home. 


VI 


I will pass over the fact that the public is 
bewildered and overstrained with the multitude 
of beneficent claims and agencies to-day, and 
I will allude to the divisions within the Church 
itself. I speak not now of the religious anarchy 
of the public mind. Protestant missions have 
suffered much from the competitive spirit of 


the Churches. The great missions of the © 


medizval Church and of the Roman Church 
did not so suffer. There the missionary knew 
he had at his back the whole force of a united 
Christian world. He went out direct from the 


MISSIONARY APATHY 119 


bosom of the Church itself, he was not the 
agent of a society. But now that is impossible. 
Each section of Protestants has its mission— 
a fact which I am far from deploring. But 
without comity and delimitation between them 
it must not only confuse the native mind, but 
also inspire the ordinary observer at home with 


asad sense of waste, of undignified competition, 


and of divided councils in the great attack on 
heathenism. It is a stupendous, an almost 
hopeless, task to the common eye, this of 
converting heathenism into Christianity. And 
many must feel that it is made still more 
hopeless if there be want of unity in the force 
which is to deliver the assault. 


Vit 


But consider this also. Every age is not equally 
suited for brilliant missions. It need not be that 
the Christian missionary passion is really less in 
the Church, but no ardour can produce the same 
results without as with favourable opportunities. 
And it has been observed that the great mis- 
sionary epochs were mainly those in which took 
place great disturbances of population, great re- 
arrangements of races, or great new discoveries. 


120 SOME CAUSES OF 


The great successes of the medizval missions 
were connected with the Teutonic conquest of 
Europe. A fresh young race gave call and 
scope for the apostles of the faith, and kindled 
the imagination of the Church with the vision 
of a world of new spiritual possibilities. The 
great Roman missionaries appeared concur- 
rently with, or soon after, the splendid dis- 
coveries by Spain’ and Portugal both to Hast 
and West, but especially Westwards in the 
discovery of America. The great Protestant 
missions which arose last century, and especi- 
ally the London Missionary Society, can be 
historically shown to have sprung out of the 
effect produced on the religious imagination by 
the discoveries of Cook in the South Pacific. 
You know that the first efforts of the London 
Missionary Society were for long expended in 
the South Sea Islands, where indeed they have 
gained their most indubitable successes. 

But to-day we have none of these things. 
We have no fresh races and worlds being thrust 
on our ken in the same way. The exploration 
of Africa is not what the discovery of Africa 
would have been. It rouses the public curiosity 
and interest, especially in the matter of markets, 
but it does not inflame the public imagination. 
No, the region of discovery to-day is rather in 


MISSIONARY APATHY 121 


the scientific realm, the scientific aspect of the 
world we have long known. It is the savant 
who is making new worlds to dawn on us, and 
néw infinities to open away from our feet. And 
accordingly it is in that direction that much of 
the missionary and annexing energy of Christi- 
anity is going. More people than ever before are 
pushing the realm of Christian thought into the 
new regions of scientific discovery. We are busy 
doing for thought what we are also doing for 
politics—Christianising it. This too is missionary 
work. In every way Christ is preached and His 
kingdom spread. Let us widen our range of 
vision. Do not think the missionary soul is 
dying out of Christianity because it is spreading 
into new forms. At the first entry on these 
new forms some interest is sure to be with- 
drawn from the old. You cannot give the same 
attention, or perhaps the same capital, to the 
old business when you are starting a new along- 
side of it. But the moment you find the old in 
real danger you will return to it and give it 
your special attention again. 


Vill 


I notice, as a further explanation of whatever 
decay there may be in the public interest in 


DS 


122 SOME CAUSES OF 


missions, that change in the Christian mind 
which has in some measure replaced piety by 
philanthropy, and made the gospel take a social 
rather than an evangelical form. We are more 
preoccupied with amelioration than salvation. 
As compared with the Christianity of half a 
century ago we are more sentimental both in 
the good sense and in the bad. We are more 
touched with the passion of pity. But it is not 
spiritual pity of the kind which moves mis- 
sionaries to leave all things in order to supply 
the soul-needs of the poor heathen. It is only 
indirectly that current philanthropy can be said 
to be spiritual; its direct object is not spiritual 
but temporal destitution. Even missions them- 
selves have felt the influence of this tendency, 
as we see from the institution of medical 
missions. The gravity of our social problems 
is absorbing so much of the fund of compassion 
that a less supply than before is available for 


missionary purposes pure and simple. At home 
we are in a social crisis. We have lost that 


ease and comfort, that contentment with the 
domestic order of things, which gave the old 
Dissenter leisure of mind and heart to con- 


sider the heathen. And it is to be confessed, 
_ too, that we have in some measure lost our own 


sense of the preciousness of the soul and the 


3 


MISSIONARY APATHY 123 


supremacy of spiritual concerns. The passion \ 
to evangelise has in some measure died into | 
the passion to assuage; and the salvation of 
Christ, taking the shape forced upon it by the 
crying exigencies of the hour, is more than ever 
bent upon redeeming the heathen misery which 
is not only at our own doors but on our own 
conscience. People feel that they did not create 
that outlying paganism ; but they did create, our 
enormous prosperity has done much to create, 
the horrors which are being dragged to light 
before our eyes. We therefore feel in respect 
of domestic heathenism, not only that it is 
more miserable than foreign, but that it saddles 
us with a prior and more intimate responsibility 
which may easily for the time submerge interests 
of a remoter and more spiritual type. 

This social mission is the kind which for the | 
present impresses the popular imagination. | 
Few missionaries do this, much as they deserve 
to do so. None among them since Livingstone 
are commanding figures in this sense. The 
popular Christian hero in foreign parts is of a 
military and absolute type, like Gordon. The , 
public mind is not in tune to respond to work 
of the soul as once it did, and as it does still to © 
other causes. And one can only hope that, when 
something has by time and wisdom been done 


124 SOME CAUSES OF 


to deal with these most imperative needs, our 
sympathies may be again set free to cross 
the sea and consider the paupers there. There 
can be no nobler motive for pressing on 
domestic reform and the removal of home 
grievances than the desire thus to liberate our 
energies for the spread of our supreme blessing 
to other peoples of the earth. 


Ix 


One has no business to criticise the missionary 
societies except in the interest of missions them- 
selves. These bodies can afford to ignore the 
attacks of those whose objections are to missions 
entirely. But any expressed criticism on the 
policy and procedure of the societies should be 
eagerly welcomed as a frank contribution 
towards the help of men who have done and 
are doing a great, a splendid, but a most 
difficult work, and a work whose collective 
value only history will be in a position to 
assess. If there be any deficiency in public 
support, that is probably due to the suppressed 
criticism which will not be frank, and which 
takes the modern fashion of war and boycotts 
the society. It criticises it by mere abstention, 
or, by reducing its support, it makes the con- 


, 


MISSIONARY APATHY 125 


fession that the missionary idea is losing its 
spell. 

Acknowledging, then, the marvellous work 
done and doing by a marvellous expenditure of 
devotion and labour at home and abroad, it may 
be well to confess that in moving about one 
hears criticisms which it is a pity do not oftener 
come to explicit shape. I may add in passing 
that the impatience of criticism does not come 
from the officers of the societies so much as 
from some of their zealous supporters. 

The remark that missionary work cannot be 
done by a society, but only by great missionary 
spirits of the heroic and all-renouncing type, 
is very far from correct. Let such spirits go 
forth by all means, but the existence of a society 
does not prevent that. But there is danger 
that a society should tend to discourage and 
repress the new and unfamiliar types of indi- 
vidual originality which may rise within its own 
pale. Organisation may kill spontaneity, and 
the missionary spirit has its very being in the 
free spontaneity of its Christian impulse. Of 
all branches of the Church the missionary 
societies ought to be most tolerant, most ex- 
pansive, most sympathetic, in their temper 
and views. But complaint is made that it is 
not the tolerant and flexible side of Christianity 


126 SOME CAUSES OF 


which is chiefly represented in the directorate 
of these societies, that the type of belief en- 
couraged is rather the type which is in favour 


with the least informed and most sympathetic 


side of the Christian Church; that too little 
disposition is shown to link on to the existing 
types and forms of religion found in heathen 
civilisations; that a due distinction is not 
always made between the spirit of Christianity 
and its Western form, and a due readiness 
not shown, in approaching heathenism, to sub- 
ordinate the latter to the former; that their 
theology of reconciliation is not a theology 
reconciling in its nature and methods; that 
there is the usual conservative dread of meeting 
native aspiration—that, for example, too little 
use is made to begin with of the sacred books 
of the old religions; that missionaries who 
have been affected by the newer and more 
sympathetic methods have been embarrassed 
and discouraged by the management at home; 
that enough scope is not given to the individual 
or enough freedom to his Christian enterprise 
and insight; that too much is expected from 
converts in whom live on the traditions and 
heredities of centuries of heathenism; that 
these are expected to take those forms of 
Christian life and thought which Europe only 


ee oe 


MISSIONARY APATHY 127 


arrived at after troubled centuries; that the 
older missionaries have been so long removed 
from the influence of the best English culture 
that they suffer under a like complaint to that 
which makes the Anglo-Indian quite incom- 
petent as an English politician; that the ob- 
taining of funds is made too prominent an 
object; that the work has been pushed too 
fast, faster than our measure of faith can go: 
that consequently the methods of the societies 
are too much at the mercy of those who 
subscribe the supplies but who are least 
competent to decide the more delicate and 
crucial issues which arise; and especially that, 
about the reports from abroad, which ought 
really to be business-like and consular, there is, 
for the sake of the religious world, an atmo- 
sphere of conventionality and partiality which 
the suspicious outer world takes for unreal 
and disingenuous; that in consequence the 
missionary becomes the agent of a concern 
more than of the Church, that he is profes- 
sional more than apostolic, or, when he has 
zeal, has more zeal than ability; that the 
societies themselves rely too much on reports 
and results and too little upon the influence 
that would be exerted on the public imagina- 
tion by the missionary idea itself illustrated in 


128 SOME CAUSES OF 


powerful, free, and original men, or powerful, 
liberal, and original thought; that, for want of 
such things and the respect they breed, mis- 
sionary enterprise has been too much at the 
mercy of caricaturists like Dickens and too 
sensitive to the public laugh. 

These are specimens of the objections which 
are far from uncommon, and which I mention, 
not because they are my own, but because 
they are among existing causes (whether 
verifiable or not) which cool down missionary 
ardour in the public. Several of them I should 
challenge; but they say there is always some 
fire where there is smoke, and it would be 
well if any foothold for such remarks could 
be removed in so far as the policy of our 
societies can remove them. Some of the ob- 
jections are inseparable from the conduct of 
missions by a society instead of by independent 
individuals proceeding directly from the heart 
of the Church. Others, again, would be met 
if the objectors ceased to do no more than 
object, and threw themselves with their large 
ideas into vital missionary interests, and took 
part in the control of missionary affairs. It 
is the criticism by abstention which is letting 
the control go into too conservative and timid 
hands, in so far as that is the case. When 


MISSIONARY APATHY 129 


all is said and all discounted moreover the 
triumphs gained and the work done are 
enormous. A very poor form of Christianity, 
it should be remembered, is far better than the 
kind of religion which has been expelled from 
the South Sea Islands, and which confronts you 
everywhere among the populace of India. I 
have been so frank with objections in order 
that I might convince you, when I beg you 
still to support the London Missionary Society, 
that I do not do so out of blind compliance 
with custom, but after some real consideration 
of the merits of the case. I am going to devote 
another evening to draw out for you the 
intimate, nay vital, connection of the missionary 
spirit with the Christian spirit. I am going to 
point out how with the failure of missionary 
zeal our religious action is lowered at the heart. 
But taking it for granted to-night that you 
believe this, I ask you to put your hand to 
the missionary agency which God’s providence 
has placed nearest you, and, reserving all proper 
rights of criticising the conduct of affairs by 
your responsible body, still maintain and 
increase your support of the London Missionary 
Society—at least till you find a society better 
worth your missionary confidence. And I do 
not know where that is to be found. 
Missions 10 


: 
: 


acd 
a 


os 


and a nation that knew not Thee shall rw 
of the Lord Thy God, and for the Holy 0: 
hath glorified Thee.”—Isazz ly. 5. 


SOME GROUNDS OF MISSIONARY ZEAL 


N a previous discourse I discussed the causes 
of missionary apathy. I pointed out that 

in many cases the missionary spirit had not so 
much decayed as taken other forms. It had 
gone largely into philanthropy at home and 
Christian statesmanship abroad. Social in- 
fluences had to a large extent taken the place 
of influences purely religious. Missions them- 
selves were conducted, not by individual effort, 
not by the Church directly, but, as it is the age 
of machinery, by special societies for the 
purpose. It is an age of engines and the 
engineers. This is the type of missionary effort 
also characteristic of the socialistic tendencies 
of the present century. The wholesome instinct 
of England dreads a State socialism, but courts 
safety, and avoids explosion, by pursuing 
socialism on voluntary principles. We have 
in like manner missions managed not by the 


huge polities of the Churches, but by the freer 
133 


2s toe 
aa 

a 

Le 

4 

‘ 


agency of voluntary societies, of special 
machines, whose success enriches the Church 
while their failure does not imperil it. I further 
pointed out that these societies, being small 
polities, could only thrive through the free 


134 SOME GROUNDS OF 


exercise of that criticism upon them whereby 
alone political affairs are nobly, liberally, and 
efficiently carried on. I ventured to recapitulate 
some of the prominent objections and criticisms 
made upon the work and policy of the societies. - 
And I did so not so much with the view of 
adopting and pressing these criticisms as to 
show that I had not excluded from consideration 
all that was urged against the work. And I 
said I thought the societies were in theological 
matters not quite abreast of the time, that they 
hardly recognised the changed and changing 
mood of the Church itself, any more than they 
had adapted themselves to the new democratic 
basis of operations. This last policy will become 
more and more pressing. . The old steady con- 
tributors of large sums are passing away, wealth 
tends to flow in other directions, and the 
societies must endeavour to do more to interest 
and increase the contributors of small sums by 
inviting their criticism and participation as well 
as their support. And in like fashion the 
massive and exclusive theologies of the past 


cael 


cw 


MISSIONARY ZEAL 135 


based on an oligarchy of saints are, if not break- 
ing up, being greatly modified, and a more 
tolerant, liberal, and comprehensive spirit 
prevails in the holding of even the old beliefs. 
A feeling spreads that the forms of our Western 
theology are not always calculated to attract (to 
say nothing of converting and inspiring) the 
mind of India and China. The power of the 
everlasting gospel is not denied or attenuated, 
but its evidence and agency are sought rather in 
the shaping of congenial theologies in new lands, 
rather in empowering them to manufacture 
their own theology, than in the importation in 
bulk of the foreign product. To such considera- 
tions of statesmanlike flexibility and largeness 
it is complained that the societies are not yet as 
alive as they might be, or for the work’s sake 
should be; and that the work in India, for 
example, is suffering owing to this cause. It is 
contended that a more liberal theological aspect 
would both attract the best public at home and 
the best heathen abroad. 

But when all the force of criticism has been 
expended, it has to be borne in mind that its 
work is not destructive, but corrective. No 
criticism can supply solid ground for deserting 
the societies in contempt or despair. And if it 
did, the desertion of the societies does not mean 


136 SOME GROUNDS OF 


the surrender of the missionary idea. Chris- 
tianity is missionary whatever be the policy 
or success of the societies. If the religion 
can create new Churches at need, it cannot be 
judged incapable of creating new missionary 
societies when the old are hopeless. But that 
would be a gratuitous task to lay upon the 
Christian spirit. At worst the societies need 
but adjustment, not discarding. Their founda- 
tion was no blunder of the Spirit, nor even an 
experiment. What they have done and are 
doing seems, the more one dwells on it, to 
suppress more and more the strictures which 
arise; and it needs, in a sympathetic heart, 
some useful oblivion of the vast positive re- 
sults to clear mental space for criticism which 
it would be idolatry to withhold. It is only 
the petty supporters of the societies that can 
resent free criticism of their policy. But it is 
only the petty critics that have nothing but 
criticism to give. | 

The directest argument for missions is the 
reality of one’s own Christian experience, and 
the illimitable expansion of gratitude and 
sympathy which in our best moments we feel. © 
An argument still more powerful, though not 
perhaps with so many people, is the nature, 
genius, and idea of Christianity as the final 


MISSIONARY ZEAL 137 


spiritual and universal religion. A further 
argument and corroboration is added by 
the history of Christianity itself since its 
entry into the world. And this argument is 
clinched by the enormous success of the mission- 
ary societies during the last hundred years—a 
success which fills one not only with a deep 
sense of the sweep and power of our religion, 
but with a genuine admiration for the zeal and 
strategy of those who manage missionary 
affairs. 

In urging the claims of missionary effort on 
your attention, however, I will not follow exactly 
that order of consideration. I will rather begin 
with some which lie farther out and draw in 
upon the centre as I proceed. 

And first, you will observe that savagery, or 
barbarism, or even paganism, is not a stable 
or permanent state of society, nor is it a condi- 
tion inseparable from the coloured races. It is 
a state which must either gravitate downwards 
into extinction, as in the case of the imbruted 
aborigines of Australia, or it is one which must 
work upwards into some higher order of things. 
Leaving out of account those races, if there be 
any, which are hopelessly committed to extine- 
tion, and dealing only with those which have 
some potency of life still left, we observe that 


138 SOME GROUNDS OF 


there are two agencies, or perhaps three, by 
which they may and indeed must be taken 
in hand. 


I 


They may be got hold of by civilisation. But 
of civilisation there are two kinds. There is— 

1. The civilisation which is quite cut off from 
Christian principle, however much it may have 
of the varnish of Christian name and religion. 
Such is the civilisation of some classes of 
English. Such is the civilisation of France. 
Such was the civilisation of Spain and Portugal 
in the age of American discovery and conquest. 
The history of the American aborigines proves 
what the effect of such civilisation is. It is the 
extermination of the lower race by war, 
massacre, and those vices and diseases which 
the lower races appropriate from a godless 
civilisation far more quickly than they take 
to its good. What befel the Mexicans at the 
hands of Spain is just what may befall the 
Malagasy at the hands of France, though in 
a slower form. And it is further to be re- 
membered that the civilised race itself which 
has only its civilisation to go upon has a 
constant tendency to follow the exterminated 
race into brutality and decay. The brutality 


MISSIONARY ZEAL 139 


may be of a refined sort, and the decay may 
be slow; but mere civilisation, unpermeated 
by real Christian influence, is simply paganism, 
whose inevitable tendency is to glide through 
refined lust and cynicism into a savagery as 
cruel as the primitive savagery, only with the 
feebleness of decrepitude instead of the vigour 
of youth. There is not in mere civilisation, in 
mere culture, the antiseptic force which arrests 
degeneration, and determines the progress in the 
direction of true development, as the Spanish 
America of to-day may tend to show. 

2. Whatever therefore is to be done for an 
inferior race by civilisation must be done by a 
Christian civilisation—a helping and offering, 
instead of an exacting, civilisation—by a civilisa- 
tion which is Christian in its moral temper, 
whatever its ritual or its theology may be. 
That is to say, it must be done by one of the 
two great missionary agencies of Christianity 
which I described as being the Church and the 
State. And a truly Christian State cannot but 
be missionary when placed among peoples of 
inferior privilege and power. It exercises that 
indirect but indispensable form of missionary 
agency which is the function and tendency 
of a Christian civilisation in contact with a 
civilisation lower in the scale. It is Christian 


140 SOME GROUNDS OF 


society in its saving aspect, its radiating, 
generous, sheltering, and beneficent aspect. The 
best example of this is to be found in the new 
spirit of British rule in India. And the utter 
difference between a civilisation truly Christian 
and one only nominally so is well exemplified 
in comparing the Spanish massacres in Mexico 
with the huge, and largely successful, efforts 
made by us to cope with Indian famines, as well 
as our less successful efforts to reduce Indian 
taxation to something short of the mere margin 
of livelihood. This is an order of missionary 
effort which will increasingly occupy the future 
of our politics. The missionary spirit of the 
Christian nation will become more and more 
indispensable to its own existence. And to keep 
our present position on the earth, we must 
strive to rest more on the confidence of the 
peoples we save, and less on the fears of those 
we conquer. We must erect trophies and 
monuments in the hearts of the vanquished 
by mercy rather than rear architecture in the 
subject lands. Moreover this is the only hope 
for those inferior races themselves. In the 
tremendous struggle for existence on the face 
of the earth, which will become a war of 
races, as among ourselves already it is one of 
individuals, there is no prospect but extermina- 


MISSIONARY ZEAL 141 


tion for the inferior civilisations, except in one 
event—except in the spread among the higher 
races of that missionary Christian spirit which 
approaches the weak not to destroy but to fulfil, 
not to crush but to raise and preserve. 


II 


But apart from the indirect action of Chris- 
tianity through civilisation and society, these 
lower races may and must also be reached by 
the direct agency of missionary religion. The 
collective action of Christian society cannot 
reach those springs of heart and conscience 
which have to be renewed for the real renewal 
of a race’s life. Government can do little more 
than forbid, protect, remove obstacles, and offer 
facilities to a career. Society cannot act with 
searching renovating force on individuals. What 
of the soul that craves the career? Compared 
with the direct application of Christ to the 
soul, of religion to the heart, the action of 
Christian civilisation is negative and prepara- 
tory only. That is in general the relation of 
law to gospel. The Old Testament law itself 
was a ministry of grace. But it was so in 
quite a negative way compared with the ful- 
ness of grace in the ministry of the gospel. 
So with our political and our’ evangelical 


142 SOME GROUNDS OF 


agencies in the missionary cause. Our admini- 
stration, as is the nature of law, can but act 
on the mass, even when it acts positively. It 
is a nation preaching to a nation, a race acting 
on a race, in the region of the general soul. 
But our evangelisation must proceed on more 
individual lines. And it is this individual action 
that is the most powerful factor in settling the 
future of the races with which we have to do. 
No Christianising of our policy can dispense 
with missionary effort in the more direct and 
special sense. And in the case of India, perhaps 
our Christian policy is preparing difficulties for 
us, and dangers, which can only be met by the 
subjection of the Hindoos as individuals to the 
control of the gospel. We have plied them 
with the literature of public liberty without 
preparing them, as Puritanism prepared us, by 
the influences of moral liberty. If we give a 
Christian emancipation without bestowing that 
inward Christian freedom which alone can 
safely manage enfranchisement, we may only be 
preparing for India revolution, anarchy, and new 
despotisms. It is a principle which applies at 
home as well as abroad. Every step in political 
enfranchisement entails a corresponding effort 
in the direction of evangelical personal religion, 
lest our new freedom be but a weapon placed in 


MISSIONARY ZEAL 143 


hands subject only to passionate and selfish, and 
not to moral or spiritual, control. 

Now, this principle of personal religion implies 
that a large personal latitude should be allowed 
by the societies at home to their agents abroad. 
They should have a free hand, not so much in 
committing their societies to outlay, as in adopt- 
ing original methods, and offering original 
presentations of the gospel. I believe the care 
and consideration of their agents by the 
societies is very great, and almost tender, so far 
as resources allow. But I speak of a higher and 
more intelligent consideration, which is not so 
much for their persons as for their souls. These 
agents under the action of circumstances on the 
spot must undergo a good deal of correction, 
and subject their ideas and plans to a good deal 
of readjustment. And if they are men of quick 
vital spirit, and men of duly capable mind, they 
may possibly find at times a restatement of their 
truths to be an absolute necessity, both for 
their work’s best success and for the continued 
vitality of their working spirits. It is to the 
missionary, not to his society, that we must look 
for the exercise of that individual influence for 
personal religion which is the core of missionary 
hope. The influence of a society must always 
be to a large extent of the indirect sort already 


a 


alluded to as a feature of the great society of 
the State; and itis a true part of its work to 
foster education in particular among the races 


144 SOME GROUNDS OF 


with which it deals. A missionary society is 
really a small Foreign Office. Its sphere is a 
small State in itself, and its action must to 
a large extent partake of State methods and 
defects. And these they can only supplement 
and remedy by conceding a very ample freedom 
to the missionaries they send forth charged with 
the function of individual influence. No instrue- 
tion to the outgoing missionary should be more 
emphatic than this—that he stir up the gift 
within him, that he develop fearlessly his 
Christian faith, and that he may look always 
to the society for large sympathy, its support, 
and latitude in so doing. The Churches should 
be taught to regard the occasional extra- 
vagance of some ardent spirit with more sym- 
pathy than the placid perseverance of those 
“blameless Bellerophons” whose schemes no 
winged Pegasus ever taught to stray. The — 
benefit of such a policy would appear in the 
quality of man who would be attracted into 
missionary work. And, though Boards of 
Directors would experience perhaps at first a 
little more concern, yet they would in time 
recognise that their agents are not mere ad- 


MISSIONARY ZEAL 145 


ministrative proconsuls, who have simply to 
earry out the instructions of the Foreign Minister 
of the day. They would come to feel that the 
missionary’s real success was far more in pro- 
portion to his difference from an official than to 
his resemblance. It is only thus that the 
societies can meet the objection that the genuine 
missionary work is impossible to a society and 
possible only to indomitable individuals. 

And we may put the matter more broadly and 
strongly still, and say that in India, at least, the 
future of missions depends on securing, either 
from English or native sources (but especially 
the latter) a large number of commanding per- 
sonalities for missionary work. The soil is 
rapidly getting ready for their operations. The 
fallow ground of old paganism is breaking up. 
Its elements will soon have been long enough 
exposed to the disintegration of natural process. 
The need will not be for ploughers to plough. 
That is being wisely done by many agencies, 
whose shares go to the very subsoil, and whose 
spirit goes to the dividing of bone and marrow. 
The need and the cry will be, nay is, for sowers 
to sow, and especially for men who can stand the 
spiritual climate of the country and thrive on 
it. The call is for highly endowed natives in 
particular, able on the one hand to appropriate 

Missions 11 


146 SOME GROUNDS OF 


the fulness of Christ’s gospel, able on the other 
to issue it in terms of the Indian mind. Let us 
be as liberal and flexible as we may, yet we can- 
not easily do this. All we can do is to make our 
faith fascinating to those who can, to the flower 
of India. The old idolatries are breaking up. 
Caste even is beginning to crumble. The state 
of things is coming to be just what the pagan 
world was when Christianity entered it. Hindoo 
religion is just in the condition of Greek and 
Roman religion in the first century. This is a 
negative preparation and much of it is to be 
placed to the credit of the societies, as an offset 
against the small number and low class of their 
professing converts. But it is a serious thing to 
have taken away one religion without being 
able to replace it by another and a better. And 
it may be plainly said that the theology with 
which the missionaries went out a century ago 
will not do what has to be done for India. If 
we have no other hope than that, our case is 
desperate. That will not either attract or 
subdue the flower of India to the obedience 
of Christ. It has views of the Bible, of God, 


of Christ, and of the future too Hellenic and — 


too medizeval to make such an event possible. 
And we must become convinced that it is the 
flower of India that we have to secure, if 


a ae 


MISSIONARY ZEAL 147 


our work and Christ’s is to be done there. 
The conversion of low-caste Indians of non- 
Aryan race, even if they were much more 
numerous than they are, would not Christianise 
India. We get wrong notions sometimes on 
this head, drawn from wrong ideas about 
the spread of the early Church. We think of 
the Gospel making its way to the front by 
its slow effect upon the slaves and populace 
of the Roman world, as if its whole action 
during the first few centuries was upwards from 
the dregs of society and of intelligence. This is 
not so. Humanly speaking, but for the com- 
manding mind of Paul it is hard to see how 
Christianity could have survived its first con- 
venticles, or its mere Judaic disciples, with their 
national prejudices. And, after Paul, what 
would have become of Christianity in Europe 
had it not succeeded in mastering some of the 
greatest minds of the age, both from the Roman 
and the Alexandrian world? It was the splen- 
dour of the elect remnant of Paganism no less, at 
least, than the faith of the converted residuum 
which secured Europe. Those great figures 
whom we now hold transfigured as the archaic 
fathers of the Church were the protagonists 
of their age, the master spirits of the civilised 
world, versed in all the culture of the day, 


Uh eae 
wy 
NPA 


and not afraid to express their Christian faith 
in the wonderfully, nay providentially, apt 
forms of Greek philosophy or Roman adminis- 
tration. The Church drew into it the intellect 
of the world to which it went. And it did so 
because it went before that world as a power 
rather than as a system; as a power with 
a system to make. The Christian faith when 
it presented itself before the culture of either 
East or West had not become a hardened 
scheme. It was making huge conquests while 
the Canon of Scripture, the formule of creeds, 
and the machinery of the Church were but 
forming. It was a spirit. It was a life. It 
was adeed. It wasa gospel. It was a thing of 
principles rather than of dogmas, a thing of soul 
and power. So it was able to pass, like an in- 
sinuating, subtle, and shaping spirit, into the old 
philosophies and the old aspirations; which it 
could never have done had it emerged upon them 
as the crystallised system which latter-day mis- 
sionaries have had to take in their hands. This 
spirit, this life of the new faith, laid hold of the 
choice minds and the most potent lives of the 
then world, and Europe was converted by 
Europeans, not by Jews; it was converted by 
the conversion of the flower of Europe, through 
the spiritual and intellectual aristocracy of the 


148 ' SOME GROUNDS OF 


a 


MISSIONARY ZEAL 149 


West, just as we say India should be converted, 
if she is to be converted as a nation at all. 
There is surely life enough in Christ still to do 
for the moribund paganism of India what He 
did for the effete paganism of Greece and Rome. 
What is the use of dying systems to fight dying 
systems? It is a ghastly work that, to set creeds 
upon each other in extremis, that they may have 
their death struggle in each other’s embrace. 
And it is foolish work besides. Either we do or 
do not believe that Christ hath life in Himself. 
If we do not, our missions are mockeries. If we 
do, then let us go, and let us send, bearing in our 
own souls that inexhaustible life, opening its 
gospel upon the thirsty world of creeds out- 
worn, and leaving it to Christ Himself to give it 
a body in every land asit shall please Him. The 
political aspirations of this country are meeting 
and mingling with the political aspirations of 
India. What is the matter that our religious 
aspirations are not doing the same? But that 
political effect was not produced till the old 
systems and traditions of Indian government 
were given up, and the political genius of Eng- 
land began to act on India. And the religious 
result will not accrue till the systems and 
traditions of the religious world are lightly 
worn, and we go to India with the genius of 


150 SOME GROUNDS OF 


Christianity. That is Christ, and the Cross 
of Christ, which is the Gospel of the holy 
Father of the world, with His universal and 
redeeming love. Then, if at all, Christianity 
will appeal to the mind and soul of India, 
not to a scattered few of its populace. And 
the flower of India will scatter the seed 
over the length and breadth of the land, and 
carry the cross where European feet have never 
trod, and could not tread. The Indian systems 
of thought present, like the ancient Greek, 
certain affinities to Christian truth, and offer 
singular foothold for a spirit so subtle, nimble, 
and adaptable as the Christian spirit. And a 
new and distinct form of Christianity may be 
looked for, destined to enrich the glory of 
Christ more than many conversions of mere 
individuals, when India’s past, by India’s living 
and present soul, interprets the ever-living and 
present Christ to India’s future. Then shall 
Christ in turn interpret India to herself; and as 
now in Christian light we see the meaning and 
destiny of Greece as Greece herself never saw 
it, so we shall by our religion give India to her- 
self in afar more deep sense than if we made 
over the peninsula to its own sons for govern- 
ment, and withdrew our forces and administra- — 
tors to our own side of the sea. 


MISSIONARY ZEAL 151 


The first ground for missionary zeal therefore 
is the instability of the lower civilisations. And 
this fact comes home and saddles us of the 
higher with a great responsibility, because our 
intercourse with them is so great, so growing, 
and so constant. If Europe were shut within 
Europe, it would have no such serious responsi- 
bility arising from this source, from the labe- 
faction of the lower societies. This is a source 
which would impose on us no responsibility if 
the inferior race lay quite out of the range of 
our intercourse. We might desire in that case, 
and ought to desire, to save such races, out 
of Christian sympathy and the responsibility of 
Christian brotherhood. But the duty would not 
arise then from the mere sense of the instability 
of the lower race’s existing condition. We 
should have no such responsibility towards an 
inaccessible race which we heard of by some sort 
of balloon post as decaying within walls of thick 
ribbed ice round the north pole. But the special ° 
responsibility arises from the fact that our 
contact with these races is at present the 
mightiest influence in the complex of their 
experience, that no cause is working on them 
so powerfully for revival or for decay as 
European contact. And it is therefore a matter 
of the gravest responsibility, to any civilisation 


152 SOME GROUNDS OF 


with a conscience to feel responsibility, how 
that contact shall act. Shall it hasten the 
extinction of these races, or shall it so foster 
their preservation as to give them the chance of 
a new birth and a new life? I have insisted 
that any civilisation which is Christian in spirit 
must use its efforts in a reviving and preserva- 
tive direction, but I have further urged that 
such general national and indirect effort is not 
enough. We must give these races the secret of 
our own power, and teach them, among all im- 
ported industries, the manufacture of men. We 
must use means to bring to bear on them the 
purely religious and individual influences which 
lie behind our political prosperity. We must 
deal with them as individuals, by individual and 
voluntary effort, and not as mere masses, by 
the machinery of the Christian State, or the 
contagion of Christian civilisation. We must 
give them that in their own souls which makes 
States Christian and keeps them so. We must 
attract, and enlist, and inspire the most con- 
siderable personalities among them. We must 
win many rich, many wise, and many noble 
from among them to the Christian faith, power, 
and ideal. We must lift the policy, already pur- 
sued, of native teachers to a much higher level 
and significance. We must employ the gifted 


MISSIONARY ZEAL 153 


men so gained in Christianising not India only 
but the Indians. Did I say employ? That was 
wrong. ‘They shall be no employees of ours. 
They shall go forth as apostles, not in our 
service or pay, but in the service of Christ and 
their country, as among ourselves gifted men rise 
with their gifts, and cast them into the treasury 
of the nation’s true wealth, and lift us to ever 
higher levels of insight and attainment. If 
Hindoos accept enough of our culture to serve 
their country by entering our Parliament, is it 
preposterous to dream of Hindoos accepting 
from us a culture which, though Christian, 
should not cease to be Hindoo in its sympathies 
and ideals, and then going back as missionaries 
of the new creed among their own people? If 
educated Hindoos may come to serve their 
country through our institutions, why should 
not educated Hindoos come to serve their 
country in our religion, which is ours in no 
sense of monopoly or supremacy, but is equally 
theirs? A time may come when the missionary 
societies may have the offer and the chance of 
educating such men. Caste and prejudice may 
soon so give way that Indian youths of the 
higher ranks and powers shall propose them- 
selves to some of the societies, not for the work 
of the native teacher or even of the ordinary 


154 SOME GROUNDS OF 


missionary, but for the highest education Europe 
can give, with the object of returning to India 
to spread freely and independently the faith and 
love of a Christ who shall speak to India in a 
native mental dialect. 

Be that as it may, enormous calls will yet be 
made on the missionary societies, and enormous 
chances offered to them. And if they are 
allowed to starve and dwindle meanwhile, how 
is the great future to be met? I say the work 
they are doing is work (criticise it as you will) 
which has in it the power and destiny to grow. 
It is not dying work. It is not work worthy to 
die. It is work needing for its development 
only the larger hope, and the larger sympathy, 
and the larger practical interests of the Church 
at home if we could escape from the triviality 


which is our mildew. And it is work whose 


record is enough to kindle all the sympathy 
its future needs if you will view it in its 
large features, its formative idea, and its gross 
results. 

I have spoken of India especially because 
it is there that the crux of missions lies. 
I might have equally spoken of China— 
especially of late years. Succeed there, and 
there can be no more talk of failure any- 
where. But the political relation of India 


a Ate Dee 


MISSIONARY ZEAL 155 


to us makes a peculiar demand on our 
national missionary resource, whether political 
or voluntary. And as much or more could be 
said about missions of the simpler sort, where 
no ancient and hereditary civilisation has to be 
met, but only wild beasts of passion in dense 
jungles of ignorance. The story of African 
missions, of South Sea missions, of missions 
manifold in similar circumstances, is a story 
that cannot possibly end as a mere epic torso, or 
fall with the mere past as a truncated romance. 
To withdraw support from missions at present 
is not simply to maim them, it is to decapitate 
them. They have gone too far. You have 
encouraged them to go too far to stop now. 
They have become organisms too highly de- 
veloped to bear amputation without shock or 
fatal risk. It is only the low amorphous organ- 
isms that you can starve and lop without 
seeming to affect their vitality. As you rise in 
the scale mutilation means more and more 
danger, and you can hardly venture on it 
without being prepared to kill. The societies 
themselves are not preparing to die. They are 
not moribund for want of ideals, nor bankrupt 
in Christian courage, or even British pluck. 
There is no surer sign of heroic strength in a 
commander sometimes than a wise disregard of 


156 SOME GROUNDS OF 


human life. And when I read that the London 
Missionary Society has since 1876 sent into 
Central Africa twenty-three men, of whom ten 
have died and nine retired ill, and yet that the 
Directors have solemnly resolved “to prosecute 
the Mission with greater earnestness than 
ever ”—as I read that, I answer with a thrill 
that this is not only pluck, not only bravery, 
but courage on the heroic scale, and courage 
of the quiet, sustained sort that an intense 
Christian faith alone could feed. It is strategy — 
of the large, exalted kind such as the true-born 
soldier loves. It is such courage of faith as 
makes the annals of Christian heroism to shine. 
And it is courage of the anointed unearthly 
sort, in the face of fearful odds, such courage as 
the British heart should warm to with its 
inheritance of the valour of old Rome. 


‘‘The gods may choose a conquering cause, 
The conquered cause be mine,” 


was the soul of old Cato. And it is but right 
and sound that the grand stoic heart of old 
paganism should pass into the spirit of a 
missionary body whose business it is, not to 
ignore or despise the paganisms of to-day, but 
to uplift and transfigure them, beat them, so to 


MISSIONARY ZEAL 157 


speak, in their own valour, and show them to 
themselves glorified and perfected in the glory 
of Christ. 

Things like these do not show a loss of self- 
confidence or failing faith in the cause or its 
prospects. And these men call upon us for 
our pittance of pecuniary help. You see their 
stern resolve, their devoted patience, their 
audacious prudence. And you have it muffled 
almost to a solemn whisper in the floating 
voices of those whose graves are baking in 
African suns or soaking in malarial swamps. 
They invoke you not to let their lives be 
wasted and their agony, blood, and sweat be 
thrown away by leaving the work they have 
so baptized. This work has cost too much 
to be dropped now. You can only save an 
investment by investing more. And no work 
so begun in death can end in anything but 
victory, unless Christ’s conquest of the world 
by dying for it be a dream. And it is only 
a type of the mission field at large. That 
field is a grand Aceldama—a field of blood. 
It is the graveyard of our hero brothers. 
There are too many precious bones moulder- 
ing there for us to leave it to be trodden 
down by the resurgent hordes of a paganism 
they had begun to conquer. Long ago the 


158 SOME GROUNDS OF 


flower of Europe’s chivalry poured out their | 
toil and blood in a frenzy of enthusiasm for — 
the Holy Sepulchre, and the land 


‘Over whose acres trod those blessed feet 
That many hundred years ago were nailed, 
For our advantage to the bitter cross.” 


And the age of chivalry is not wholly past, 
though its inspiration and its shape have 

changed. The people is deeply sunk that per- | 
mits and ignores the desecration of its precious 
tombs. We love our world because it was 
once the grave of our Christ. We love our 
faith, our creed, because it is the shrine of our 
dying Saviour and the creation of our living 
Lord. We love our native land because we 
live on a soil enriched and hallowed with the 
dust of all the heroisms that most concern our 
national life. Well, are we not citizens of the 
kingdom of heaven ? And wherever the 
name of Christ has come is the country of the 
kingdom. And that soil, too, is rich with noble 
tombs and faithful dust. We cannot consent 
to abandon the tombs of our missionary past, 
or let go to waste the work which so much 
blood has sealed. We cannot abandon to the 
wild beasts the cemeteries of our holy and 
heroic dead. We could do so only by confess- 


; 


¢ 


a 


MISSIONARY ZEAL 159 


ing our missionary expeditions to have been 
blunders, and our apostles the victims of some 
infatuated mistake, some deplorable visionary 
epidemic. And when we have come to that 
we have really gone much farther. We have 
confessed our Christianity itself a mistake, its 
sight of Christ a dream, its vision of a redeemed 
world a fancy, and all its triumphs of thought 
and deed, its crosses, so plentifully dotted over 
the earth and for the most part known only 
to the Lord of the Cross—all that we have 
virtually declared to be poetry of the kind 
which has but a distant bearing on the reality 
of things. For I shall have to show you that 
it is the very soul of Christianity which is the 
genius of the missionary spirit and the reality 
of Christianity which is denied when its mission- 
ary destiny is impugned, 

I am much concerned that you missionary 
sympathisers should be roused and _ secured 
by reflecting on considerations of a wide and 
modern sort, rather than that you should 
simply have that interest stirred by the 
proceedings of any particular society. For I 
cannot avoid observing that the objections 
taken to missions are taken to a large extent 
by those who claim first and always to be 
broad and liberal; and they are taken also to a 


160 - SOME GROUNDS OF 


large extent on the ground of what is deemed 
unsatisfactory in the proceedings of some or all 
of the societies or their agents. But it would 
be the greatest of misfortunes if breadth of 
view should come to be associated only with 
the critical, cold, and less generous side of life; 
if only such views were allowed to be rational 
as made against the methods and ideas which 
have come down to us from the past. The 
grand function of reason, after all, is not 
destructive but constructive, and the nature 
of true reason is something far more high 
and worthy than is to be found in the mere 
judgment of the past or the criticism of pro- 
cedure. The supreme function of reason is to 
pierce and seize the essential and informing 
idea, to appreciate the distinctive genius and 
native tendency of any movement or institution, 
and to preserve its soul and quality not only 
unchanged but exalted amid all the changes 
of form suggested by the free criticism of 
results. What is the use of faith in an idea 
if it do not carry us through the stage when 
facts seem against it? “I am not ashamed 
of His gospel; for I know that He is able to 
keep that which He committed to us.” Nothing 
is less reasonable than many forms of so-called 
Rationalism, and it is a matter of regret that 


MISSIONARY ZEAL 161 


the greatest movements of thought and 
conscience should have been robbed of so good 
a name as Rationalism by the word having 
sunk almost hopelessly to designate what is 
but a menial function of the reasonable soul. 

I would therefore guide your attention to 
the rational and ideal side of this subject, 
not with the poetic purpose of expanding an 
idealism merely imaginative, but of expounding 
an idealism which is simply the soul of reality. 
And in so doing I seek to follow the Christian 
method, and fortify you by principles against 
the vicissitudes of mere individual opinion or 
temporary circumstance. I pursue the Christian 
method. For we are rightly taught in Pro- 
testantism that we are to judge the Church 
by Christ and not Christ by the Church. 
We are taught that none of the most 
lamentable spectacles which Church history 
offers in parody of the faith of Christ should 
weigh with us to the throwing over of Christ 
Himself. And we are invited to claim our place 
in the Christian Church not because of its 
splendid history but because of its unique 
inspiration, its eternal power, and the infinite 
grace resident in its Centre and Head. We are 
not Christ’s because we belong to the Church, 
but we are of the Church because we belong 

Missions 12 


162 SOME GROUNDS OF 


to Christ. There lies, in a few words, the 
whole difference between an _ ecclesiastical — 
system and a Christian. What a power over 
the world, over the vicissitudes of history, — 
we have in this position! Rooted in Christ, 
we are not uprooted by any errors in Church — 
methods, any failure of Church aims, any 
infidelity of Church practice or belief. We 
stand above these things in the commanding ~ 
mind of Christ Himself, and we are in a free 
and capable position to measure the city of 
God with an angel’s golden rod, to walk about 
Jerusalem and go round, and tell its towers, and 
mark its bulwarks, and note the breaches, and 
build up the waste places, and even pull down ~ 
its battlements and build greater. We have 
the key of history put into our hands just 
because we are so free of history. It is a sadly 
remarkable thing that the Catholic Church, 
whose very life lies in long history, in a 
historic line rather than a historic centre, in 
being able to make out a flawless line of 
tradition and an official succession unbroken— 
that that Church is not the quarter to which 
we look for the true, scientific, and commanding ~ 
treatment of history. But in the field of 
historic study we find the triumphs of achieve- 
ment in the Protestant spirit and the Protestant 


MISSIONARY ZEAL 163 


lands, where men descend upon the past from 
the height and power of the scriptural Christ 
instead of burrowing their way up into the 
light of God through the dense and contorted 
strata of tradition. We interpret the Church 
by the Spirit, which is the fruitful and powerful 
method. We do not interpret the Spirit by 
the Church, which is a method sterile and 
wrong. 

So I am anxious to impress your conviction 
with the missionary idea, rather than weary 
your attention with missionary results. When 
the hostile results have been discounted the 
power of the missionary idea is unimpaired. 
And if you are well secured in the faith that 
missions, however they may fail or be mis- 
managed, are yet true and necessary, then you 
will not only escape a sinking heart at their 
reverses, but you will be inspired anew to 
contribute your own corrections and readjust- 
ments with a view to future success. Your 
criticisms will be sympathetic. These corrections 
might involve change, not of procedure only, 
but of policy; but missions, you will feel, must 
go on, as England must go on, with such 
changes, reforms, and candid confessions of 
past failure or error as circumstances require. 
I would kindle in you the missionary spirit, 


164 CAUSES OF MISSIONARY ZEAL 


not as a mere gleam which will be broken up 
in rough water, nor as a glow one day to cool, 
but as an essential principle and idea which the 
hottest experience does but anneal and fix. 
I would, indeed, so inspire you with the! 
missionary idea that it shall seem to be the 
very being and genius both of Christianity and 
of England, nay of civilisation; so that the 
action of the various missionary societies shall 
be only parts and aspects of the mighty process” 
and the inevitable tendency of a Humanity 
redemptive because redeemed. 


a 
q 


THE NATIONAL ASPECT OF MISSIONS * 


UCH has been written, and well, as to 
the prevalence of “natural law in the 
spiritual world.” There are many acute and 
beautiful analogies between the phenomena of 
nature and spirit. But they are little more 
than illustrations or analogies. Drummond’s 
book is a long sermon, not a treatise of philo- 
sophic value. If there be unity and continuity 
in the two spheres, it is the higher that gives 
the law to the lower, and not vice versd. 

To me it is far more interesting to trace 
the dawn of spiritual law in the natural world, 
and seek the continuity there. I would not 
interpret the doctrine of election by the law 
of natural selection; I would interpret natural 
selection by spiritual election. 

It lowers the moral temperature to think 
of the spiritual life as natural. That life, 

* Preached at the Centenary of Rev. William Knibb, and 


at Kettering, his birthplace. 
167 


168 THE NATIONAL ASPECT 


being of grace and the Cross, reverses nature. 
When people are morally uneasy about certain 
acts they fall back on nature and say they 
are natural. They carry natural law into the 
moral world. War, for example, is justified as 
a natural means of keeping down the popula- 
tion to the limit of subsistence. But when 
you rise to the level of beings with a con- 
science law ceases to be natural ; it begins to 
be supernatural. Then the natural thing is 
to obey conscience and not nature. War in 
such cases is the survival of a lower stage, 
the dying twilight of a lower realm. It is 
more of an anachronism every rising genera- 
tion. 

The survival of the fittest and strongest, the 
monopoly by the superman, being a matter of 
mere power, is the law of the natural world. 
But the law of the spiritual, being of grace, 
includes not only the care of the weak but the 
recovery of the lost. Amid much that is tender, 
patient, and helpful there is nothing redemptive 
in the natural world; yet that is the law of 
the spiritual. It is better to trace the fine 
dawn of grace in the lower creation than the 
horrible survivals of nature in the higher. 
Maternal devotion in monkeys, or the civic 
instinct in bees and ants, is a more cheering 


id 
OF MISSIONS 169 


spectacle, a more spiritual prophecy, than 
militarism among men. It has more of the 
future in it. The most prophetic thing in 
nature is the mother love in animals. And 
the most reactionary feature in society is war. 
Heartlessness is horrible in the higher just 
because it is higher. We resent these survivals 
the more we respect ourselves. 

We are higher because we have in conscience 
something which gives law. In nature we 
have only what obeys it. And the conscience, 
ever since the Cross, has been in its ideal 
redemptive. 

Too much has also been made of the way 
in which peoples, nations, societies grow like 
an organism. We are fond of tracing with 
Bagehot the analogies of “ physics and politics.” 
And too little tends to be made of the fact that 
the higher we go in the scale the more un- 
likeness we see between the two kinds of 
evolution. A Church does not grow like a 
tribe. A high society feeds the weak, a low 
one feeds on them. The East India Company 
of the eighteenth century devoured India, the 
British Government of the twentieth feeds it 
through famines, and slowly invites its peoples 
into self-government. We are here at the 
opposite pole from nature—in the realm of 


170 THE NATIONAL ASPECT 


grace. Huxley has admitted a great limitation 


on evolution from this very point of view. © 
He admits here the hopeless collision of evolu- — 


tion with ethics. 


Nature says, Let those survive who can, who — 


are fit. Grace says, Let us make them fit—fit 
for the eternal survival by giving them 
eternal life. Nature and the natural man 
devours the weak, grace and the gracious 
man lifts them up. We learn to survive by 
the power we lend others to survive. 

But if so, then our missions are a triumph 
of social evolution. They represent one of the 
highest forms of social progress, perhaps the 


highest. They show us one society helping — 


a weaker—not only its own weaklings, but 
another and weaker society, and even rounding 
upon many of its own members in order to do 
-so. This is the kind of evolution which sets a 


‘Church above a nation or a race, and drives 


a man for the sake of the gospel to leave his 
nation, and almost forget it, in the new affection 
_ for lands that are his only in Christ. Even 
nations, and not only Churches, may grow to 
this. 

Mark how we have grown in this matter. 
Observe the progress of history toward the 
Christian ideal. Note the stages of its advance. 


A a i i 


OF MISSIONS 171 


In the lowest stages of society when one 
tribe meets another the doom of the weaker 
is extermination. It is so with the brutes, it 
is so with savages, it is so in semi-civilisation. 
And religious sanctions even are called in to 
aid the process. The god of the tribe is jealous 
of the god of the other tribe and is believed 
to order the extermination. This was believed 
by Israel to be the will of Jehovah in the 
conquest of the Canaanites, and bitterly the 
later history of Israel avenged the error—as 
history always does avenge that policy, in 
America, in Africa, or elsewhere. It is the 
barbaric way of treating the stranger or the 
weak, the military way. They are made 
Amalekites and wiped out. 


Il 


But gradually another consideration enters 
in. Instead of killing the conquered can we 
not use them? Ferocity gives way to policy. 
Let them be enslaved. They are allowed to 
keep their religion under certain restrictions, 
but they are turned to account. They are not 


172 THE NATIONAL ASPECT | 


exterminated, but exploited. They are made 
Gibeonites. 

That is how the Egyptians treated the 
Israelites, for they were a step above Israel 
in civilisation. And it is how pagan Europeans 
regard inferior races. It is how the Southern 
whites in the United States regarded the 
negro. It is how many Englishmen regard 
“niggers” at this time. It is how almost all 
Englishmen, except Penn and his Quakers, 
regarded them up to the great evangelising 
age at the close of the last century. It may 
be called the commercial way of treating the 
weak—as slaves, as coolies, or as markets, 
as mere means and not ends, as “hands” and 
not souls. 

This is the treatment of inferior races which 
marks a plutocracy. It is a treatment which 
has revived in certain forms of relapse to-day, 
because the ruling principle in politics is finance 
and the ruling idea of the State is the economic. 
The god of such an age is Mammon, and the 
hustler is his prophet, and most of the press 
his acolytes. The military State gave place to 
the mercantile, the feudal to the industrial ; 
and it will now need all the resources of our 
Christianity to translate the mercantile State 
into the moral, to keep righteousness higher 


a 


OF MISSIONS 173 


even than efficiency, and to deliver industrialism 
from its own forms of iniquity. We do well 
to be angry with ineptitude, with pretentious 
mediocrity, but we do better still to be angry 
with wrong. And I fear our anger at wrong 
is not so easily and generously roused as it 
once was. We let the plea of trade cover 
too much. We use man for the purposes of 
commerce instead of commerce for the pur- 
poses of man. We are in danger of sacrificing 
to higher wages and larger profits sympathies 
and chivalries which would make better men 
of us. And for prosperity we are tempted 
to forget principles whose neglect is always 
avenged in calamity or ruin. The most serious 
commercial issue of the hour is not Free Trade 
or Fair Trade, but Foul Trade. Apart from 
tips, commissions, and bribery at home, think of 
the opium trade in India and China, the rum 
trade in Africa, the “blackbirding” in Queens- 
land. What of the Congo Company and its 
ways in Central Africa? What of the Chartered 
Company in South Africa, of the Raid with its 
progeny of blood, fire, pestilence, ruin, and 
grief in a great war? What of the instigators, 
abettors, and apologists, living and dead? 
What of the Turk, who must be allowed to 
massacre and outrage Armenian and Mace- 


174 THE NATIONAL ASPECT 


donian because of the commercial convenience 
and political balance of Christian Europe ? 
Our very religion, our Churches, become in- 
fected with the passion to prosper at any 

price. Many of them do not live, they are 
“run.” May God send us prophets to save 
the kingdom of God from the calamity in 
_ prosperity and the usurpation by finance! 


III 


But there is a higher stage than exploita- 
tion. The conquering race has probably a 
religion that it prizes. It begins to treat the 
weaker race religiously—to use it for its reli- 
gion. But it begins that in a barbaric way. 
It despises the religion of the weaker race; 
and it demands the adoption of its own, as a 
landlord might compel a tenant to go to 
church or leave his farm. It is no longer the 
two races that come into collision, but their 
faiths, their moral ideals. It is not a race 
conflict, but a faith conflict, What is aimed 
at is not extermination nor exploitation so 
much as proselytism. This is the ecclesiastical 
way of treating the weak. 

The most striking case is in Mohammedanism. 
But it has been the spirit also of some forms 


of Christian missions—e.g., the Roman Church 
and the Spanish conquest in America. It exists 
in principle in our Indian Empire to this day. 
I suppose the salary of the Bishop of Calcutta 
(and others) is a charge on the Indian budget 
raised from the grinding taxation of the natives. 
They are forced to support, if not to accept, 
the religion of their conquerors, as we have 
been treated for Church schools; so that the 
practice is not extinct yet in England. It is 
of the nature of an Established Church. It is 
assumed that an Established Church is a higher 
religion, and its believers look down on the 
rest, tax them for its good, and force them to 
contribute to its aggrandisement. 

Has it not also, in more refined forms, crept 
into Protestant missions of the older school? 
All religions but ours are utterly false. Believe 
in mine, and in my form of it, or you are for 
ever lost. The great object of missions on this 
level is numerical conversions. 

Well, I suppose that is a better thing than 
the Turkish passion for extermination. And 
it is a better thing than the mere trader's 
passion for exploitation, for markets, for pro- 
fiting by the people at the cost of any de- 
moralisation. I have alluded to our Indian 
opium traffic and to the rum traders. Look 


OF MISSIONS 175 


1 Be Gan 


176 THE NATIONAL ASPECT 


also at the veiled slavery of the black races in 
the guise of controlled labour which is really 
coerced. I cannot admit that munificent gifts 
from that source to scientific institutions will 
expiate the debasement of the peoples who are 
exploited to make the money and spread the 
Empire. And I would in fairness make a real 
distinction between millionaires, like Lever or 
Cadbury, who return in dew upon their workers 
what they receive from their sweat, and those 
who exploit the natives of foreign lands, and 
even demoralise them, for the mere aggrandise- 
ment of their own. 


IV 


But there is something still higher than 
conversion either to our creed or empire. The 
sole object of missions is not conversions. Of 
course it seeks conversions, but not that alone. 
Nor is it the aggrandisement of a Church. 
Missions are but Christianity in aggressive 
action at home or abroad; and Christianity 
has a larger scope than even individual con- 
versions. There is a grander word than even 
“conversion”: it is “redemption.” We are to- 
day doing honour to the memory of Knibb. 
Knibb at the call of God had to leave the work 


OF MISSIONS 177 


of conversion, and take his glorious part in the 
wider work of redemption. He left the convert- 
ing of individuals for the mission of redeeming 
the whole class. The one necessitated the other. 
He had to become the champion of his converts. 
First he gave the blacks a freedom which made 
them unfit to be slaves, then he had to take 
from the whites a freedom which made them 
unfit to be masters. 

Redemption was effected by Christ for the 
whole race, and it changed not only its religion 
but its whole moral condition and ideal. And 
it does this for the various races within the 
race. It is well to convert a man, it is more 
to convert an age. That goes far to redeem a 
whole people. You may only convert from one 
religion to another. But you redeem from evil 
to good, from a low life of sense to a high life 
of spirit, from public egotism to public righteous- 
ness. You convert from one faith to another, 
from paganism to Islam, from Brahminism to 
Buddhism, from Confucianism to Christianity. 
But you redeem from unfaith to faith, from 
the world to God, from self to Christ. You 
convert the soul, but you redeem the whole 
man. You may convert to a new affection, but 
you redeem to a new righteousness as well— 
which the Cross chiefly did. It was the great 

Missions 13 


178 THE NATIONAL ASPECT 


act of public righteousness for the world. He 
who converts may be thinking most of his 
theology or ecclesiastical system, like the Jesuits. 
But he who redeems is thinking most of the 
conscience or the society he reclaims for Christ 
and gladdens and kindles for mankind. 

To convert you may go in the name of a 
Church, to redeem you must go in the name of 
a person—of Christ. You may go to convert 
as men go seeking votes for a policy. But when 
you go to redeem it is hearts you must seek, 
and it is heart you must bring, yourself, your 
faith, and love, and suffering. Conversion may 
be individual and numerical. Redemption is 
organic and social as well. Conversion is only 
a stage in redemption, it is not all. Yet it is 
necessary. With a religion like Christ's you 
cannot redeem without converting; see only 
that you convert to Christ and to the kingdom 
of God. 

Among the many changes passing over our 
religion, missions are not unaffected. And 
among their changes this is one—that they are 
extending the spirit of mere conversion to the 
spirit of redemption. 

First they go to find and make men, and 
not mere members of a new society—to make 
Christian men and not only Christians. And 


>a 


—— 


OF MISSIONS 179 


secondly they go to uplift the weak race as a 
race, to give it the spirit of independence and 
self-help even at the cost of our own political 
supremacy. Politics grow redemptive. They 
go to claim the lower race, not for a Church 
simply, or for a religion, but for humanity in 
Christ—to enrich this race with Christ and 
Christ with the race. They go in love and 
pity to redeem—not so much to conquer as to 
make conquerors. 

That a strong nation should bless a weaker 
nation and help it to its feet is a great effect 
and triumph of Christianity in history. It was 
not known before Christ. It has been too little 


_known since Christ, but it has been known. 


How often England has done it! No nation has 
done it so often. I doubt if we are much bent 
that way to-day, I confess. We are in the 
trough of a reactionary wave concurrent with 
a partial eclipse of Christian faith. But it has 
been done, and done by us, more than once. 
And it was Christ that did it, through us. It 
is a Christian product. And it is as much of 
a miracle, a new departure from Nature, a new 
creation, as when man first appeared, dimly 
self-conscious, on the earth. 

Commerce goes and it often extinguishes 
weak races—as war does, though in a different 


180 THE NATIONAL ASPECT 


way. Its inspiration is too often coyvetousness ; 
and an impatient, selfish generation kills with 
its greedy vices the goose that would have laid 
golden eggs for the next. But the missionary 
effort of the religion of redemption goes to 
preserve these native races, and teach them 
to enjoy for themselves what the conqueror 
trader would seize. The antagonism between 
the missionary and the exploiter is perennial. 
You have to-day the same contempt and enmity 
to the missionaries in pagan Europeans as raged 
in the West Indies against Knibb a century ago. 
“‘The missionaries make the nigger too inde- 
pendent to be good for anything.” 

It is true Christianity does make the native 
more difficult to deal with in one way. You 
cannot introduce it into any race and expect 
that they will remain docile pietists without a 
growth of self-respect and public rights. The 
free workman is always more difficult to handle 
than the serf—for the slave-owner’s habit of 
mind. But it is free labour that pays both 
sides and slavery does not. That discovery was 
the finishing stroke to the slave trade. You 
cannot have paying commerce with an industrial 
army destitute of self-respect. Our commerce 
would pay better and cost less if our workmen 
had more of it, and were attached to the 


OF MISSIONS 181 


ministers as they are to the publicans. Faith 
does raise a man’s self-respect, and makes him 
difficult for any master who will not recognise it. 

Even Christian men speak sometimes as if 
missions were a pushing concern in which they 
had no shares; and they stand by, curious, 
critical, sometimes cynical, sometimes scornful. 
They think it is an occupation, a hobby, of the 
sects. 

But it is really a work of the race they belong 
to. Itis the great Christian energy of the race, 
its greatest foreign policy as it rises in the moral 
scale. It is a national enterprise. In one form 
or another it is bound up with national stability 
and permanence. Those men have shares in 
this business. They have shares in England, 
and England is a trustee of the great world- 
gospel. England exists like any other nation 
(though signally) for the kingdom of God. 
And God will permit it to exist only for its 
service to that kingdom of all nations. For 
the days come when the nation that has not 
the missionary principle will be left behind by 
those that have. The two great nations in the 
world to-day are the two great missionary 
colonising peoples—the English and the German. 
Missions are the great colonial policy of the 
kingdom of Christ. 


182 THE NATIONAL ASPECT 


The progress of society I have been urging is 
growth in helpfulness. As peoples rise in the. 
scale they rise from killing to using, from using 
to converting, from converting to redeeming. 

They say to the lower race, first, “Go to per- 
dition,” then, “Come into our service,” then, 
“Come into our church,” then, “Come into our 
Christ.” 

That moral ascent must go on. Nations will 
be great by their power to redeem the less 
favoured nations, not by their power to crush 
them and domineer. England has begun to 
impress her national Western genius on India, 
and that may submerge India either in resig- 
nation or revolt. Can she print on India her 
Christ? Can she weave India into the kingdom 
of God? If she have a Christ she cannot help 
doing so at last. If she fail to do so, it will 
be because she has no longer a Christ in any 
real national sense. And without a Christ, 
with nothing but a State or a Church, England 
herself has no moral interest and no future. 
She is hollow and doomed. She is fallen from 
grace and how can she redeem? How can she 
but relapse ? 


a 


OF MISSIONS 183 


v 


We are apt to think of the great movement 
of history as a movement onward from the 
past into the present, from the present into 
the future. But is that all? Is going forward 
just going onward? That is only an extension 
of time. It “only i increases the amount of years, 
their quantity. What is to be said about their 
quality? Is there not another movement within 
every life besides that which hurries it on to 


the next? Is there not a movement which \ 


changes the nature of a “century as well 
as adds to its years? Is there not a 
movement of what you might call translation, 
or transformation, as well as extension? Is the 
world not being changed as well as prolonged? 
Take your own case. If you only grow older 
and no better is anything gained? As you 
grow older must you not grow wiser, juster, 
kinder, holier? Must your life not be trans- 
lated from the material upwards to the spiritual. 
from slavery to the temporal up to freedom in 
the eternal? The right life is a translation 
of life from time to eternity. It is laying 
hold of eternal life. Our fathers would have 
said it was a life spent in preparing for heaven. 
We oftener now say in making heaven. So 


184 THE NATIONAL ASPECT 


the history of the world is a long slow process 

of translating time into eternity—not of transpos- 
' ing the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, 
but of translating temporal issues into eternal, 
and earthly motives into spiritual. Forward 
movements are fatal unless they are also 
expansive movements. History is not simply 
carrying over one age into the next, but 
changing time into eternity within each age. 
No age has done its duty to the next till it 
has handed on to the next a legacy more 
eternal than it received. It is the eternal in 
the past that really lives on in the present 
and the future. What i is eternity? Not mere 
duration, mn, but the mastery of the spirit over 
time, the conversion of time to the uses and 
powers of the spirit. At the heart of each 
moment eternity stands, as your eternal soul 
is within your little body. And the work of 
history is to give freer and freer play to that 
eternity within each moment, and to make 
it rule all time. Christ Himself arose at a 
point within human history and stands at a 
particular moment of it. And the whole busi- 
ness of history is to give Christ His eternal 
place in the whole course of history, His true 
and ruling place; to let loose the eternity 
locked in those brief thirty years, and give it 


OF MISSIONS 185 


its ruling place in all the affairs of time. The 
whole course of history is a vast missionary 
movement to release Christ from the past, to 
spread Him, to establish Him in the life of a 
world foreign to Him and far from Him, 
tending to be earthly, dark, cruel, and miserable. 

It is to set up the kingdom of God among the |— 
kingdoms of this world and above them. 

What is the inference for national life? 
Surely that nation has the future which has 
most of this large translating spirit in its policy. 

I will make no comment on passing affairs, 
I will leave you to make your own. But if ' 
there be a principle at work above parties, \ 
politics, and politicians, it is the principle of 
the kingdom of God. No man who does not 
own it is fit to control the affairs of a Christian 
people. No weapon raised against it shall 
prosper, and the nation that continues to 
withstand it shall utterly perish. This service 
of the world and the future is the righteousness 
which exalts a nation. And there is no sound \ F-4 ol : 
way of Emeasuring either the futnre or the world | 
but in Christ and His service. 

Who are the greatest races to-day? Not) 
necessarily those with a great past. They are 
those that have the promise of the future. | 
And who are they that possess the future of the 


186 THE NATIONAL ASPECT ) 


world? They are those who are doing most 
for Christ and all that a universal Christ stands 
for. 

The long past did not exist for the sake of 
our twentieth century present. Both past and 
present exist for the sake of a time to come— 
a time always coming and never fully here. 
We live for the majority, do we not? But 
where is the majority? Ahead of us, always 
ideal, but no less a power. Do you believe 
that the majority of the race is already born 
and dead? No, it is to come. Add the 
immortal dead in heaven to those yet to be 
born, who are all one vast solidarity, and the 
majority is awaiting us, it is not behind us. 
If our principle is the good of the majority, 

yit means the good that is to be. Which is the 
_ best sect, party, Church, or State? That which 
contributes most to the good of most. — Then 
it is that which does most for the future. It 
is not the individual that is the goal, nor the 
the present, but the vast and total future. The 
State itself, any State, must always be the 
servant of society at large. It has mostly 
been the victim of the past, or it has been the 
slave of the present, but it must more and 
more become the servant of the time to come, 
The authority of the past has held us back 


OF MISSIONS 187 


from much; we shall truly advance as we 
substitute for it the authority of the future. 

But where shall you find that future? Who 
knows it? Who can read it? Who can study 
its demands so that we can do for it what is 
best, and sacrifice for it as we should? Who 
can grasp all human society? What statesman 
can guide his State with certainty to that long 
prosperity which consists in the best service 
to human kind? Where shall we read that 
human kind whose thickest end, so to say, is 
still in the ages to come? How shall we 
interpret that authority which resides in a 
future longer than all the past and commands 
us from there? 

It has but one voice—Jesus Christ, the same 
yesterday, to-day, and for ever; the super- 
historic Christ that lived two thousand years 
ago, that reigns now from heaven, shapes 
history through the ages, and fills the eternal 
future with His infinite life. 

There is a Christ of nations as well as of 
souls. The nation with a real future is the 
nation with a real Christ, to which Christ is 
a real Lord. The race that best serves Him 
best serves the future, and best serves its own 
destiny. His is the righteousness that exalts a 
nation. There is no permanence for any people 


188 THE NATIONAL ASPECT 


or empire but in the kingdom of God, and 
no safe leader but one who believes it and 
serves it. No man has the real key of the 
world unless he is at heart an unworldly man. 

We owe more than we can say to those 
missionaries who toil, suffer, and die as pastors 
in local spheres, and founders of single Churches 
in the heathen world. But the life of a man 
like Knibb reminds us how much we owe to 


those who carry the missionary idea into our 
national life, and compel our half-pagan civilisa- 
tion gradually to recognise the Christian moral 
principle in public affairs. A national Church 
is neither here nor there (I wish it were 
anywhere but here). But a national Chris- 
tianity is essential to our national place. And 
England has no better benefactors than those 
who infuse, or who force, the principle of — 
Christ’s kingdom into our public affairs at home 
and abroad. And it is not the least of mis- 
fortunes from a national Church that it deludes 
the public into the notion that when we have 
established the Church we have done our duty 
to Christ on its public side, and it matters 
less to establish Christian principle in our — 
conduct of affairs. It is all of a piece with 
the pharisaism which leads a man to think 
that if he go to church and support its 


OF MISSIONS 189 


ordinances he need not be so particular about 
Christianity in his affairs. 

A life like Knibb’s reminds us that, for some 
of the highest missionary work, England has 
England to resist or to win. Would that so 
much of the energy of the missionary societies 
had not to be spent in rousing the Churches. 
It is a most strange and grievous thing. Would 
that when the Churches are roused they had 
not the friction and waste of conflict with the 
paganism of the home public, with its indif- 
ference, its worldliness, its covetousness, its 
exploitation, its press, its politicians, and its 
diplomatists. It is no part of the State’s duty 
to conduct evangelical missions—would that it 
were never its interest to chill them. It cannot 
be sound policy or sound business which finds 
the growth of Christianity in the natives 
dangerous to its ambitions. No sound civili- 
sation can stand upon the ignorance or the 
subservience of any class. Wherever the Cross 
goes there goes the word of emancipation. 
And it is no true British policy that dreads 
and stifles that note. Who can deny the in- 
crease of moral self-respect on the part of 
this country after the great act of Christian 
righteousness in the abolition of slavery? 
That was the practice of Christianity toward 


190 THE NATIONAL ASPECT 


a whole race. It was a great missionary 
achievement, and it had the reflex action that 
missions always have. England was the means 
of freeing the West Indian negroes. But the 
West Indian negroes were thus the means 
of a great liberation for England. Every true 
preacher knows that his people may be a greater 
blessing to him than he is to them. The 
Church has benefited from missions as much 
as the heathen. Remember the old illustration. 
A man was dying in the snow with exhaustion 
when he saw another man even worse, rushed 
to him by a huge effort, and rubbed him to life. 
It was the saving of both lives. So missions 
have quickened and saved the Church. And 
that is the effect upon the nation also of every 
great stroke of policy which gives heroic effect 
to the kingdom of God; and the men who 
inspire it are national heroes and spiritual 
benefactors. It will be long before we can reckon 
the full blessing to England of the missionary 
movement of a hundred years ago, or the 
national value of the great agents God raised 
up and equipped for that work. I pray God to 
send us more such men for public guides. We 
are in the deepest need of them, for we are 
fallen from our old grace, both in Church and 
State. 


OF MISSIONS 191 


Knibb was a fighter. May their race revive! 
We need these warriors of the Holy Ghost, 


these paladins of righteousness and priests 
of the poor. But not every one that has the 
impulse has the call. Impulse is not inspiration. 
Knibb broke loose from those who counselled 
moderation, not with the self-will of a shouting 
progressive or a shallow megalomaniac, but 
with the information and the inspiration of one 
who had grasped all the moral bearings of the 
subject and counted the total cost. In him 
there was a combination of qualities which 
fitted him for the work he was given to do. 
His portrait shows a sturdy and indomitable 
face, yet sensitive and sympathetic. He was 
a happy mixture of passion, justice, and judg- 
ment; of piety, chivalry, and sense; of energy, 
resolution, fearlessness; of speech and action. 
His eloquence was sometimes halting, but it 
was the eloquence of facts, not phrases, of 
genuine passion and adequate knowledge, the 
eloquence of reality, of things. He was both 
a kind pastor and a fearless tribune—a 
Christian pastor and a people’s tribune. Like 
every great and apostolic missionary, he came 
to love the people he saved more than the 
people that gave him birth. He took his 
converts for his true kindred. He left his 


192 THE NATIONAL ASPECT | 


native prejudices when he left his native land. 
The patriotism of Christ’s kingdom was more 
to him than the patriotism of his own race. 
Missionaries cannot afford to be patriots. He 
took the black people for his own people, and 
made more of their fellow-citizenship as saints 
than of his fellow-countrymen in blood. Feeling 
inspired action, action was sustained by prin- 
ciple, and principle was obeyed with courage. 
Danger was a new stimulus, and his courage 
was fed by faith and love, by pity and by 
wholesome hate. “He made tyranny imprac- 
ticable by raising the character of the slave”; 
and he brought it its nemesis by appealing to 
the character of the English people. ‘The 
planter said, ‘We will exterminate Christianity’; 
the missionary said, ‘ We will abolish slavery.” 
And through Knibb the missionaries won. 
Slavery fell and Christianity rose to a new 
height. Faith produced a new brood of heroes. 
With Buxton, Wilberforce, and Clarkson there 
stands the equal name of Knibb, and above all, 
and through all, and in all, the name and power 
of Christ. 

I would especially point out as I close that 
Knibb was driven into political agitation for 
the sake of Church freedom. The freedom of 
the Church was not a plank in his liberal plat- 


OF MISSIONS 193 


form but the supreme inspiration of his public 
action. Slavery was killing the gospel. The 
planters were extinguishing the Churches. 
They claimed the slaves’ souls as well as their 
lives. It was for their evangelical freedom that 
their champion demanded their social freedom. 
He demanded their freedom from men for the 
sake of their freedom in Christ. It was no 
appeal to the natural rights of men. It was 
no sense of natural human dignity that drew 
him forth. It was a Free Church for these 
blacks that was the inspiration of his free 
politics. The greatest of all the issues of 
freedom is the matter of a Free Church. 

There is more work of this kind to be done 
in other forms. May the same power be with 
us and the same faith in us. May the same 
single-eyed courage carry the like sympathy 
and justice to victories as great and sure. 
And may we have grace to feel where the 
real secret of our public freedom lies. It lies 
in a Church free in Christ’s free Spirit and 
His gospel’s last and deepest release. 


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“No man cometh unto the Father but | 


THE EXCLUSIVENESS OF CHRIST 


CERTAIN antagonism is roused by these 

words to-day. What of the great good 
heathen, some of whom rose to a deep sense of 
God's reality and righteousness? What of the 
All-Father of our Teutonic forefathers? Why 
venture on a sweeping negative like this? 
Avoid sweeping negatives. Make your affirma- 
tions comprehensive, but beware with your 
exclusions. Say, All men may come to the 
Father by Me, but do not say all must; do not 
say there is no other way. Fatherhood comes 
home to us now in so many ways. Christ is 
supreme, but He is not the only way. That is 
said. 

I answer first by the poet’s parable. Father- 
hood comes by many ways, but where is the 
real root? 

“Once in a golden hour - 
I cast to earth a seed, 
Up there came a flower; 


The people said a weed. 
197 


a“ “ = 
‘=~ 
ee 

Bia 


. 
i: 


198 THE EXCLUSIVENESS OF CHRIST 


To and fro they went 
Through my golden bower; 

And, muttering discontents, 
Cursed me and my flower. 


Then it grew so tall 
It wore a crown of light; 
But thieves from over the wall 
Stole the seed by night— 


Sowed it far and wide, 
By every town and tower, 
Till all the people cried, 
‘Splendid is thes{6wer.’ 


Read my little fable, 
He that runs may read: 
Most can raise the flowers now 
For all have got the seed. 


And some are pretty enough, 
And some are poor indeed ; 

And now again the people 
Call it but a weed.” 


' Yes, the flower grows in every garden, but 
' where did they get the seed? 

' The first plant of sure and certain fatherhood 
was imported to the earth from abroad, from 
heaven, by Jesus Christ. “No man cometh 
really unto the Father but by Me—one way 
or another by Me.” Historically Christ is the 
Source of our modern interpretation of God as 
Father. 


7 


THE EXCLUSIVENESS OF CHRIST 199 


But you press your point about the father- 
hood of God to be found in the teachings of 
pagan seers and saints. So I answer in the 
second place that people often have the loosest 
notion of what fatherhood means, or coming 
to the Father. 

By coming to the Father they may mean 
no more than arriving at final happiness, being 
saved from hell; or it may be no more than 
reaching the mere idea, or comfort, of a Divine 
fatherhood. But they are not sure that that 
idea corresponds to eternal | reality, “and that 
the mighty infinite Power is at heart Father, 
which is the very essence of Christian faith. 
Or by Father they mean little more than a 
sentimental impression of kindliness, benignity— 
some strictness, of course, for the sake of family 
order, but endless generosity on the whole. 

Now, it may be said, first, that that is not 
fatherhood in Christ’s thought. For it ignores 
human sin and God’s treatment of it as sin, 
and not as a mere slip. It does not set out 
from God's holiness. It does not include in 

‘the Father the Redeemer; it only makes the 
“vehiiee ancillary to the Father. He brings 
us back to the Father. But such a view does 
not make the Father the Redeemer. Our 
Christian God is not the All-Father, which is 


grr 


200 THE EXCLUSIVENESS OF CHRIST — 


pagan, but the God and Father of our Lord and 


' Saviour Jesus Christ. 


Secondly, such a mere general recognition 
of fatherhood is not what Christ means by 
coming to the Father. 

Nowhere apart from Christ do we find faith 


identical with the spirit of sonship, as a 


constant habit of new life. We find flights of 


aspiration and fits of faith, longings, guesses, 


glimpses, visions. But these are no more than, 
as it were, paying occasional calls. Faith is 
indwelling. It is living in the Father's house. 
It is constant, , confidential intercourse. It i It is son- 


‘ship: as a standing relation habitually re realised. 


That i is what Christ meant by coming to the 
Father. It is really coming into the Father, 
and going no more out. When we speak of 
a man coming to himself we do not mean 
only that he has occasional gleams of conscious- 
ness or sanity. So of coming to the Father. 
It means returning to a habitual state—not to 
gleams and glimpses, dotted over a great tract 
of life dark or unsure. . 

And in this sense of sonship, of coming to 
the Father, in its sense as a new life, it has not 
been had, and cannot be had, apart from Christ 
and His ever-living personality. “ Through Me” 
means, not simply “by My acts, My words, My 


THE EXCLUSIVENESS OF CHRIST 201 


intercessions,” but “ through My self, My person- 
ality,” which is the revelation, the meeting- 
place of God and man. Not was, but is. Not, 
in the historic Jesus they once met, but in the 
eternal Jesus Christ they meet for ever. 

If we fail to realise that, it is because 
we are either vague or shallow in our ideas 
of the Father, and what coming to the Father 
means. 

I am afraid we must part with the idea that 
there is no narrowness in Christianity. There 
must be. We can only take care that it is the 
right kind. Strait is the gate and narrow the 
way that leads to life. 

Many interpret that word simply of moral 
Puritanism. You find many who are quite 
Sadducees in belief and quite icebergs in 
religion, but are yet keen, rigid, and exclusive 
in the domestic, social, and moral proprieties. 
And we all agree that it is not easy to live well, 
to do always the right thing, to come out of 
active life morally greater and stronger than 
we went in. Life is difficult. 

Others may find the application in the fact 
that the secret of life will only yield to close, 
self-denying, and indomitable research. And 
others will say that genius is just the capacity 
for labour, for taking pains, for veracity, for 


202 THE EXCLUSIVENESS OF CHRIST 


perfect accuracy at any cost, and that success 
means work, work, work. The gate is indeed, 
strait. 

And so on. There are several senses in which 
the great saying would be held true by many 
who have never grasped its profoundest sense. 
There they repudiate it. They rebel more or 
less when they are told that the gospel itself 
is essentially narrow, that it is a great power 
and principle of election. The word “gospel” 
means for them the very opposite. It is all 
open doors, gates flung wide, vast spaces, 
infinite room, crowds going in, plenty of 
freedom to move about, plenty of smiling, of ‘of 
sunshine, of happiness, open mind, and vague 
creed, and fluid faith. And the element of 
narrowness, definiteness, positiveness, selection 
they feel to be foreign to the gospel. 

Yet says Christ “Strait is the gate.” “I am 
the Door.” “No man cometh unto the Father 
but by Me.” As if He said, “My cross is 
narrow and I am sole.” The gospel is as 
narrow as Christ, and Christ is as narrow as 
the Cross. It is not by a religious idea we enter 
in—either by a vague one or an exact one. 
Even an exact idea is not narrow enough. 
An idea, or even a truth of any kind, is a loose, 
vague thing compared with the existence of 


THE EXCLUSIVENESS OF CHRIST 203 


a person, a living soul and will. And it is by 
no idea or even sentiment of fatherhood, but 
by something so narrow as Christ’s filial will, 
that we enter to the Father. That individual 
will, straitened to the Cross, is the one channel 
to a habitual life with the Father. That will, 
not imitated nor reflected, but trusted. The 
way to the infinite God, the infinite Heart, 
the way to absolute certainty about it, and to 
continual life in it, is the narrow way of the 
historic man Jesus Christ crucified. 

That does seem very narrow to many to-day. 
Some resent the demand that ideas be submitted 
to a personality. Some resent the dragging 
back of the vast, teeming, vivid, mighty present 
to so remote and rude a past as that of Judea. 
Why should anything or anybody in that dim 
antiquity lay its dead hand on the living present, 
the heir of a past evolution so great, and the 
parent of an immeasurable future? Why 
should world empires, contemporary politics, 
scientific civilisations, modern industry, fresh 
discovery, new invention, splendid enterprise, 
and universal commerce be narrowed down, 
not only to the horizon, but to the control of 
an ancient Jew? 

Some say, again, it is narrow to fix salvation 
to the knowledge of Christ, because the liberal 


204 THE EXCLUSIVENESS OF CHRIST 


theology says the heathen will not be damned 
for their heathenism, which they cannot help. 
To make escape from hell turn only on the 
knowledge of the historic Jesus were to relapse 
into the narrow orthodoxies from which the 
promising Churches are breaking free. 

This, of course, is evading the question. 
Any chances in the next life would still be by 
the knowledge of Christ, by that narrow road. 
And to those who have refused opportunities 
here the conditions would be harder than here 
The heathen who never had the gospel will 
not suffer so much as we shall if we refuse 
the gospel. They may have their chance, 
but we shall have our condemnation for (among 
other things) not giving it them before. And 
God, and Christ, and all of us have to bear 
the loss of their faith and service during this 
life. Besides, Christ does not say “Outside Me 
is hell,” but “Within Me and Me alone is the 
Father.” 

In a recent writer, subtle, profound, and 
compact, I found this sentence— 


‘“‘ The exclusiveness of Christ is in truth but another name ~ 
for the absolute wniversality of His kingdom combined with its 
absolute wnity ’’ (Hort, “‘ Hulsean Lect.,” p. 160). 


Let me fix your thoughts on this. 


: 


F 


THE EXCLUSIVENESS OF CHRIST 205 


1. The exclusiveness of Christ. 

It is there. There is salvation in no other. 
Salvation is not escape from hell, but a life 
of triumphant sonship and trustful intercourse 
with God, such as is only possible by Christ. 
There are many influences which lift men from 
degradation— affections, duties, arts, sciences, 
public interests, human service. But these 
do not put you at peace with God. And these 
will collapse at last, when taxed upon a universal 
scale, unless that reconciled life in Christ become 
their moral spring. 

And the life of sonship is not only impossible 
except by Christ, it is impossible except in 
Christ. By Christ might mean that He taught 
the truth and lesson of sonship with immense 
effect; but im Christ means that we only 
realise the thing, sonship, by dwelling in Him. 
By Christ might mean that He came, left 
His message or example, and went—like any 
prophet. Jn Christ means that He lives for 
ever on earth and in heaven, with all power 
for us in the Father's glory; and we are 
really sons of the Father as we have dealings 
with Him. He is the Way; but that does 
not mean that He is the road we traverse, 
leaving it behind as fast as we go. He is 
the constant active Agent and Medium of 


oe a ae 


206 THE EXCLUSIVENESS OF CHRIST 


our intercourse with the Father. There is no — 
living in God’s fatherhood except by living 
in Christ. We hide with Him in God. He 
does not bring us to God, introduce us, and 
leave us. We have our whole converse with 
God in Him always. There is none like Him, 
none beside him, none above Him in our 
relations with God. He is our strait gate and 
narrow way. 

2. The nature of the exclusiveness—exceeding 
broad. 

It is inclusive. Itis universal. It is the sole 
universal. There cannot be two real universals 
in the full sense of the word. If A is really 
and fully universal, where is there room for 
another universal B? The prerogative of 
Christ is that He is alone universal among men 
He is exclusively universal. He is alone, but 
it is as the human race is alone in the universe. 
His is a social singularity. He is the sole 
unity zm all his units, and not merely another 
unit beside them. He is the sole and exclusive 
includer of all. His is the exclusiveness of God 
Himself, whose thought makes the universe— 
the only power that includes all and makes 
all possible; He is all-inclusive and therefore 
sole. It is a case of concentration and cohesion, 
not exclusion. In Him all things consist or 


THE EXCLUSIVENESS OF CHRIST 207 


hold together. Indeed, you cannot have uni- 
versality without exclusiveness. The one God 
is a jealous God. It seems nonsense, but 
it is profoundly true. Only one thing could 
be universal. If there were two independent 
universals, neither could be universal. Do 
not scout what I say as meaningless because 
it may seem obscure, contradictory, and para- 
doxical. The higher you rise in the spiritual 
intelligence of life the more you learn this 
—to distrust the obvious, and suspect the 
simple, on all the greatest questions. That 
which includes all must be something unique, 
something which has no parallel or rival. 
It must have a monopoly. But it has the 
monopoly of all. In a word, it must be 

3. The absolute unity. 

It must be that which gives unity to all 
things, and binds them into a whole, a universe, 
a kingdom. Universality without unity is a 
desert or a chaos. An infinite number of 
finites would be the dullest thing. If the 
world were covered with men, man would of 
course be universal; but if there were no unity 
it would be universal chaos, war, death. If the 
world were reduced to a heap of sand, matter 
would still be universal, but it would be 
universal desert. Each grain would be self- 


208 THE EXCLUSIVENESS OF CHRIST 


contained, individualist, subject to no common 
law or realm, owning no unity amid all its 
universality. This unity of rule and fellowship, 
supreme, absolute, jealous, tenacious, exclusive 


in its claims and inclusive in its scope, this unity — 
with its universal monopoly, is the sole condition — 


of existence for either a world of things or a 
society of men. Is it not the unity of Nature’s 
uniform law that holds together the world 
of things? So it is the unity of Christ’s 
undivided rule that is the final condition of 
human society in God’s kingdom. Its weal 
is as wide as the race, and as narrow as 
the High and Holy One in the midst of the 
race. The many are only blessed in the Infinite 
One, the One is only fulfilled in the many. 


The exclusiveness of Christ is universal. Hvery- 


where and for every man it must be none but 
Christ for salvation. It is not a sectional 
exclusiveness. He is not the exclusive possession 
of a sect; He is the exclusive possession of 
all mankind. Because He excludes all rivals 
He includes all souls. He is an all-embracing 


exclusiveness, a monopoly of inclusive bliss. — 
He is the jealous God of love. Do not resent 


it if I put that great phrase in modern terms. 
What else is preaching? And I must fit it 
to Christ. He is jealous for every soul in the 


THE EXCLUSIVENESS OF CHRIST 209 


mighty sum. He will consent to lose none, 
because He is love absolute, love eternal, love 
reconciling. He is our Eternal Reconciliation 
who was never reconciled. He by His sole 
rule turns the race from a mob to a realm, 
from a chaos to a kingdom. As there is 
but one Father of all, so there is but one way 
to the Father for all. It is the Son. There 
is but one Father, yet there is a Father for 
each man. It is the same Father equally rich 
to every one. So there is but one Son, in 
whom we all come to one salvation, and all 
have one sonship, and must have one brother- 
hood for ever and ever. 

Breadth of sympathy, then, must always be 
connected with a certain wholesome narrowness 
of faith, You may remember that the great 
sympathetic movement for missioning the 
heathen a century ago arose among men of 
what would now be called a narrow creed. 
The creeds that sacrifice everything to breadth, 


to freedom of thought, do not send.missions. 
Why ? ¥ 

Have you not met that class of people who 
are called globe-trotters? They have time, 
and means, health, curiosity, and interest, 
easily excited. They travel much, some in- 
cessantly. Their world is a plexus of hotels 

Misstons 15 


210 THE EXCLUSIVENESS OF CHRIST 


connected by rails. They are always — ready 
for a new excitement. They easily take up 
new concerns, new people. They have seen 
the outside of many lands, and cities, and men. 
Their creed has a certain breadth which they 
parade. It is as easy as it is broad. They 
tell you they have seen more good than you 
would think among “these black fellows.” You 
say how tolerant, fair, generous they are. 
They have seen nothing which raises their 
gorge, their pity, their tears, their shame, 
, nothing which shocks them out of their own 
finicking self-indulgence and fribbling smoke- — 
‘room talk, nothing that rouses them to a 
sense of duty, of kinship, of responsibility, of 
brotherhood, to these same black fellows. Their 
creed may be broad and brief but it is not 
brotherly, They have never done a turn for — 
those people. They never helped those who 
did, they never looked with sympathy on those 
who did. They took the current tone of so 
many Englishmen abroad, and they showed 
their superiority by contempt or indifference 
for anything done for the heathen in a religious 
way or in Christ’s name. They take it for 
a mark of tolerant savoir faire to say, “ Leave 
them. Their own creed is the best for them. 
They are as good as many Christians.” In- 


F 


THE EXCLUSIVENESS OF CHRIST 211 


deed, yes. They might easily be better_than 
some. 

“As it is with these grievous people, so I 
say it is with the creeds that sacrifice every- 
thing to breadth, and are interested in all 
faiths alike. They do not send missions, they 
do not help missions. They are globe-trotter 
ereeds, cosmopolitan but not universal. They 
are, in the world of mind and belief, what these 
rich tramps, these returned empties, are in the 
world of movement. They are not narrow 
enough for enthusiasm. For enthusiasm you 
must concentrate, you must “have positive 
religion. You cannot let your mind ramble 
and stagger about at its vagrant will. You must 
concentrate and compress to get energy. These 
fluid ereeds are not narrow enough for duty, 
for a sense of responsibility. For that you must 
have more definite lines and a more fixed centre. 
That_is it, a fixed centre. Now, that was 
the real secret of the great missionary move- 
ment of a century ago, which did so much to 
compensate for the narrow creed. It was not 
the narrow creed but the fixed and fiery centre 
that was their real strength. They had the sun, 
though their calendar needed adjusting, and 
other reckonings were somewhat out. Or, to 
change the image, the power of the stream lay 


——— 


~ 


wy 


212 THE EXCLUSIVENESS OF CHRIST 


really not in the rigid banks but in the great ; 
volume of faith that flowed from the inexhaust- 


_ible fountain of the Cross. We may have out- 
_ grown their creed, but God help us if we also 
' move from their centre! You cannot call that 
“ growth. A town does not grow if it just cover 


new ground; it may do that by keeping the same 
population and just moving in another direction. 
Its centre may move with it and the place 
grow no larger; it only grows if it enlarges 
round its old centre. A tribe “does not grow 
‘which just migrates; it covers new ground but 
it is only by leaving the old; it does not spread 
out round the old home. So it is with the 
growth of our creeds. They may enlarge, and 
mean less. They may..know more with less less 
faith. They may move with the times nes but 
get loose from eternity. They may gain some. 
clearness of head but lose much ardour of 
heart. Christ may have more adherents but 
fewer believers, more sympathisers but not 
more confessors. nef 

Breadth of sympathy, I repeat, must be 
guarded and balanced by a certain wholesome 


_ concentration of faith. There is an element 


'of narrowness in all intense faith, as there 


. is of exclusiveness in intense love. And without 


an intense faith sympathy soon runs shallow 


THE EXCLUSIVENESS OF CHRIST 213 


and goes dry. And I mean narrowness in the 
sense I have explained—something narrow 
enough to have its living centre passionately 
always at the cross of Christ. I mean by it 
the definiteness, positiveness, and piety which 
go with intense faith. I mean the exclusive- 
ness which I have been describing, the exclu- 
siveness which Christ Himself stood for, which 
He preached, which He realised in the limits 
of His own person as sole Saviour. For the 
whole Incarnation is a limiting, a concen- 
trating, a narrowing down, an excluding—just 
as the mighty power and use of personality 
itself is. 

God has one purpose for the world, not 
several. Would several purposes be a sign of 
liberal breadth? It is a definite purpose, not 
a vague and slack one. It is narrowed down 
out of all vagueness in the person of Christ, 
the most condensed, definite, and impressive 
Figure of history. It is limited into practical, 
effective power there. It takes the definite 
shape of a single vast work there. It is 
positive there. 

And to that purpose God has one path; it 
is also Jesus Christ. He has one life for 
mankind, one truth; it is Jesus Christ. We 
must never, indeed, confine Him to one age, 


———* 


214 THE EXCLUSIVENESS OF CHRIST 4 


race, civilisation, or Church. That is anti- 


Christian exclusiveness. But we must insist 
that He is both the goal and the path of human 
perfection and human happiness. There is no 
future for the race but in the kingdom of God, 
and there is no kingdom of God possible but 
in Jesus Christ. 

The race that owns no claims of other races 
is still barbarian. The whites that disown 
their responsibilities to blacks are but half 


civilised—and many of them but veneered 


savages. Such races have, as races, little claim 
to the name Christian. The people which 
only exploits other peoples is still a pagan 
people. Such a people has turned its Church 
into a curse and condemnation. Or else their 
Church has by its falsehood become their curse 
and its own damnation. It has betrayed its 
Master. It has sought itself, and sacrificed 
His kingdom. No Church without missions 
can now be a Christian Church. It has lost 
the universal, the imperial, aspect of Christ. 
It may have broadened Him till it has dissolved 
Him in a mist. It may have made Him so 
human that it does not feel Him to be a Divine 
authority in any real sense. Jt may have 
dropped to a mere literary religion ‘which hates 
‘an evangelical faith. It may have lost ‘out of 


ee eee 
eee Oe 


| 
) 
a 
j 


. 
ai 
. 


f THE EXCLUSIVENESS OF CHRIST 215 


Him the imperious element. And when that is 
gone the imperial element soon follows. If | 
Christ cease to be our King, we shall not long © 
believe in a Divine kingdom. If He do not rule 
us, we cannot believe in a universal realm. 
Christ the mere Brother can never establish 
human brotherhood. The brotherhood of man 
can only centre in the kingship of Christ, and i in 
the cross ‘as His throne. 

“Yes, He is a “jealous | God. He claims mono- 
poly. He will be sole Redeemer, the sole 
Agoniser of salvation, the one Bearer of the 
world’s sorrow and sin so as to take them 
away. That is His monopoly. Few will con- 
test it, few grudge it to Him. It is an election 
few will covet. We never come near it except 
as we are taught by His own Spirit. And the 
more we know of the Father the more do we 
confess we owe it to Christ, the more do we see 
how it was possible by Him only, the more do 
we see that no man really, practically, per- 
manently cometh to the Father but by Him. 
Those who have lived nearest the Father have 
been most forced to confess that it was only 
by having in Christ what Christ has in none 
—a mediator. 

That is the abiding ground of Christian 
missions. 


4 


216 THE EXCLUSIVENESS OF CHRIST 


The Father the supreme blessing, the sole 
final blessing, of all men, the portion of our 
hearts and our strength for ever. 

The Son the sole means for realising the 
Father. The gospel of the Cross the sole 
channel of the Father's revelation (as distinct 
from mere intimation); the sole vehicle of the 
Father’s self-giving, the condition of permanent 
sonship. 

It is death to our own faith if we take not 
this gospel to all men. We shall close our 
own hearts to the Father and His blessing. 


We shall lame, retard, or sacrifice the future. — 


We shall sink into the selfish happiness which 
is the prelude of a people’s decay, a social 
corruption, a civil strife, an empire’s ruin, a 
debased end, 

Think as highly as you will of other religions, 
but they cannot rise so high as the Father 
of our Lord Jesus Christ. And no man cometh 
to abide in the Father but by Him. Go ye 
therefore and preach this gospel unto all 
nations. Preach it with your own joy in the 
Lord, your own gratitude to the Redeemer, 
your own faith in His eternal power, love, and 
' grace. You believe, you do believe, you 
believe more than you are aware. You need 
but the crisis, the call to wake up to the bearing 


2 


_ THE EXCLUSIVENESS OF CHRIST 217 


of the belief which has been slowly, silently 
gathering in your soul. Do something, do 
much, in the name of your faith, and you will 
_be surprised to find how much faith you have. 
Pray at such times as these, in private pray, 
for the dark people, for the preachers and 
workers among them, who have come to love 
them more than their white home and cannot 
stay away from them; for the administrators of 
missionary enterprise; and for the Churches, 
that they may be made and counted worthy 
to evangelise the world more and more. Pray 
that slowly in the Churches may be built up 
that faith which is not forced or galvanised, 
but accumulates in the stillness, and then 
overflows, in a stream of steady, growing, 
creative, and ever self-creative Christian power. 
And if after all these considerations you are 
tempted to talk with the trader’s contempt of 
missions because of the inadequacy of some 
missionaries, or, more likely, your dislike of 
them all—pray, pray, consider whether it is not 
your soul and your heart that are chiefly wrong. 
The Lord save us from the sentiments of our 
sets, from travellers’ tattle, from the com- 
mercial-room ‘creed, and the man in the train 
with the Daily Mail! 
The Lord feed you from other sources, make 


218 THE EXCLUSIVENESS OF CHRIST — 


your religion apostolic, your belief missionary, ; 
your heart full, your faith firm and first-hand, 
your mind Christ’s, and your sympathies those | 
of that kingdom which underlies and overrules 
all the political and commercial combinations 
of men. | 


* 
’ 


o 
is 


is Able ie 


‘ et oa 
—— | ae 


THE MISSIONARY’S STAYING POWER 
ISAIAH Vi. 


HIS is a precious piece of autobiography 

to which I am sure none of you are in- 
different. Fragments like these from men of 
genius are sought for by the literary world as 
pearls of great price. But here is a man who 
to the inspiration of genius added the inspiration 
of redemption ; and he has left us in possession 
of his own account of his life’s mo.s decisive 
hour. It is a craving of our age to desire to 
look into the secret workings of great souls. 
We wish to take them to pieces and see how it 
is all done. We shall never really know (for 
the mystery of the prophet’s inspiration has 
never yet been analysed); but we all want 
to look. We want to be taken into their 
confidence and shown the hidden riches of 
their secret things. This is a craving it is not 


easy to gratify in the case of ancient writers. 
ear 


222 THE MISSIONARY'S STAYING POWER 


They were not so introspective as we, they 7 
were not so taken up with themselves; so they | 
left us little record of their private crises. But 
the prophet of Israel was a partial exception to 
that rule. He was saved from himself, not by - 
avoiding himself, but by passing through himself 
and out at the other side. He was forced to 
face his own soul in order to find the God who 
delivered it. He was a missionary who, like 
Paul and Luther, found his world commission in 
his own redemption. He preached a Redeemer 
' as they only can preach Him who have found 
Him. So we have here the prophet’s decisive : 
experience from his own lips. It is the kind of 
chapter that would nowadays be headed 
“ How I became a Missionary.” 

He is a missionary, he is not a mere doomster ; 
because he is a prophet of judgment unto salva- 
tion and not of calamity untodeath. His speech 
was to a people with a future, and his word of 
doom was an agent in bringing the future about, — 
through the remnant sifted from the mass. — 
The missionary goes to save not souls only, 
but the future of the race to which he is sent. 
Missions lose half their scope when we do not 
believe in the future of the races to which we 
go. We should go by preference to the races 
that have a future. If a race have a Divine 


| THE MISSIONARY'’S STAYING POWER 223 


future, even those who refuse the Divine message 
will be indirect and unwilling contributors to it. 
The motives that make a missionary, judging 
from this self-revelation, are— 
(1) Imaginative. 
(2) Voluntary. 
(8) The passion of fear, and pity, and hope. 
(4) The enthusiasm for holiness. 
(1) The missionary’s impulse is imaginative. 
The scene that opened on the prophet’s eye is 
one of the sublimest visions of the soul. You 
see the marks of a dream in it. “His train 
filled the temple.” A grand feature which 
could only exist in the vagueness of fantasy. 
It could not be put on canvas, could not be 
brought-to the definiteness of a picture (if it 
could be, the old Italian painters were the only 
men to doit). Moreover, there is no delineation 
of the face or figure of the Majesty that sat on 
the throne. How could His glory be con- 
centrated in features of man? The fulness of 
the whole earth was His glory. The house 
was filled with rolling cloud. Only His lower 
parts, so to speak, are visible. The visible world 
is but the lower part, or under side, of that 
glory which is the world’s fulness and unity. 
And the seraphs covered their faces in the 
awful Presence. It is such a scene as only a 


224 THE MISSIONARY’S STAYING POWER 


great poetic genius could behold, and a great | 
spiritual imagination frame. : 

You need imagination for the missionary 
impulse, especially for foreign missions. You 
need the sense of the glory of the Lord, of the 
fulness of the whole earth, and of the voice that, 
crying, shakes the pillars of the house. It is not ~ 
easy to conceive of a man of no imagination 
becoming a great missionary. It is the imagina- 
tion of boyhood that leads many a youth to the 
mission field, as it leads many to the sea. It is 
the romance of missions, the call of the deep 
and the wild. It is the same thing, with a 
consecration of faith added, that seals the re- 
solve and finally sends him abroad. To his 
visions of foreign lands he adds visions of — 
redeemed peoples. His eye has seen the glory 
of the coming of the Lord. He dreams a 
dream of good. He has visions of an earth 
full of the knowledge and glory of God. He 
has the imagination of the adventurer with | 
the consecration of the prophet. Every mission-— 
ary must be an idealist. The man who has no~ 
sympathy with missions is devoid of imagina-— 
tion, and sometimes he seems even a little 
proud of his defect. j 

(2) The missionary’s impulse is voluntary. 
It is not coercion, but self-devotion. He does 


MISSIONARY’S STAYING POWER 225 


not take it up for a living, but embraces it as 
a divine vocation. His ideal is not his magni- 
fied and prosperous self, but the enlarged realm 
of Christ. He answers a divine voice which 
wakes him to divine power and service. It is 
not task work, slave work, labour sold as a 
commodity. It is not a grievous necessity, but 
a joyful, solemn necessity. It has come upon 
him from sight of the unspeakable glory. It 
is a call from a Spirit, answered by a spirit which 
finds there its native freedom. The true mission- 
ary cannot be called up for foreign service like a 
conscript. He must be avolunteer. “Send me.” 
The initiative is not his, but the response is his. 
It is obedience, but it is originally free. He 
answers with himself. He cannot go except he 
is sent; but being sent, he cannot but go. And 
he goes with all his heart and might. A 
necessity is laid on him, but it is one of those 
necessities in which we find our true liberty 
and our true selves. The most voluntary 
missionaries have also been the greatest mission- 
aries. It was so in the great mission ages of 
the past. The great figures were men who went 
forth moved and sent, not by organisations, but 
by the Holy Ghost. And as to modern missions, 
it is remarkable that in this land at least they 
have sprung from the voluntary Churches. 
Missions 16 


226 THE MISSIONARY’S STAYING PO 


Organisations though they are, their native soil 
is in the voluntary Churches with their evan- 
gelical freedom, their living faith, their personal 
appeal and personal responsibility. | 
Of course, though voluntary, the missionary 
life is not self-willed. Life never begins to be 
| serious in the largest sense till we feel we have 
been sent into the world. The young hero who 
steps upon the world like a demigod, and has. 
life all before him where to choose, has not this 
sense of seriousness. His will is self-will, life 
has not for him allegiance, he has a career but no 
mission. Itis the sense of a mission, an obedience, © 
that makes life truly serious and truly great. You 
should feel that what you do you were sent to 
do. Itisaduty, itisatrust. I do not suggest 
that you must have a mission in the sense of 
taking up a cause which you give your life to 
advocate. That is very well but it is not for all. 
But all should live with the feeling that they 
are sent. Their work should be duty, and duty 
cannot be self-appointed. Christ is our example 
here as elsewhere. Freely as He came He came 
because He was sent. There was nothing 
arbitrary about Him. He lived with a mission, 
He answered acall. We ought all to have not 
only some prospect, some occupation, but some 
calling in life. 


THE MISSIONARY’S STAYING POWER 227 


And the point I would make is, that the more 
we realise that truth for ourselves, the more 
sympathy we shall have with those who pro- 
secute a mission in the great and special sense. 
Missionaries understand missionaries. Were we 
all sent of God, we should feel more with those 
whom we help to send for Him. Who is so 
likely to be in sympathy with missions as the 
man whose whole life is ‘Here am I, where 
Thou hast sent me”? 

(3) The motives of fear, and pity, and hope. 

The first message of the prophet was one of 
doom. It was the promise of judgment. It 
was a word of fear. He was made to see that 
his message would offend more souls than it 
helped, and so precipitate a calamity that might 
be long. But it does not turn him. 

He is moved with a deep pity. “ How long, O 
Lord?” It is more than he can bear. The 
thought of the sufferings of the whole for the 
sin of a part wrung the cry from him. 

But at the far end is hope. Sorrow is 
purgation, wrath is judgment and not mere 
nemesis, suffering under God means redemp- 
tion. Things are not at an end with the 
people. It was a question of the people, not 
of individuals, and for the people there was 
a future. It was a chastened future, but a 


228 THE MISSIONARY'’S STAYING POWER 


glorious one; there was hope in its latter end. 
There was heart and promise in his threat, and — 
not mere doom. 
Is there no fear in the impulses that move a 
man to the preacher’s work? Does he not know ~ 
better than his critics that he brings a gospel — 
whose refusal leaves men more condemned than ~ 
it found them? He carries peril as well as 
grace. Will he be a true missionary if he have : 
no sense of doom and a wrath to come? Is the | 
missionary’ God a soft God? Does he go to 
banish fear, or is it to teach men to fear the 
right God and fear Him aright? “Fear not them 
that kill the body, and after that have no more 
\ that they can do, but fear Him who is able to 
: destroy both soul and body in hell; yea, I say 
unto you, fear Him.” Is there nothing in that 
any more, and no theme for the preacher who 
goes to men that cannot understand a religion 


ee 


i ie 


without fear? Missions decay under a soft God. 
But will the apostle go at allif he have not 
more pity and love than warning for the poor 
people who are the victims of their own dark- | 
ness and sin? A man without pity is not fit” 
for the messages of Christ's God. He is not 
fit for the work that saves. Can a divine 
gospel be put into the charge of inhuman | 
men? Is the message of judgment safe in 


4 f 


‘fe THE MISSIONARY’S STAYING POWER 229 


pitiless hands? Can we show that even truth 
is divine if it be but harsh and unkind? 

The missionary must pity and he must hope. 
The pitiless, hopeless faith is the bigot’s faith, 
not the prophet’s, not the missionary’s. It 


proselytises, it does not evangelise. It devas- 


tates, it does not chasten. It is the judgment of 
Mohammed, not of God. God’s judgment comes 
in the name of hope, of final redemption. The 
decay of hope is the death of missions, And 
the faith of the missionary is a solemn faith 
but it is a sanguine one. 

(4) The great missionary motive of the Church 
is the enthusiasm for holiness. 

The prophet received his mission in an atmo- | 
sphere charged with unutterable holiness. It | 
was not the poetic splendour of the vision 
which awed and stirred him. It was not the 
imaginative glory of the scene. That might 
have made him an artist, an orator, but not 
a prophet, not a missionary. What at once 
crushed and moved him, abased him and lifted 
him out of himself, was the glory of holiness. 
Every splendour seems to carry with it some 
trace of earth but this. It is the most un- 
worldly of all unearthly things. It takes a 
man out of himself, shames him out of himself, 
gives him to his highest self and truest destiny. 


230 THE MISSIONARY’S STAYING POWER 


It puts the new song into his trembling lips. 
It endows the stammering man with mighty 
speech, and sends him forth from his abase- 


ment with all the power of the Spirit of God. 


It cleanses the very lips that it moves to confess" 


themselves unclean, unclean. It emboldens the 
very conscience that it had just made to quail. 
It inspires with a grand fear which forgets 
fear. It gives) a message to the man who 
feels in its presence that he is nothing and has 
nothing. When the enthusiasm of humanity 


comes it turns the spirit of adventure into the 


spirit of help; but the enthusiasm of holiness 


——T mh eS 


see 


makes the spirit of help the spirit of redemp- 
tion. It not only consecrates the old, it creates 


a new spirit within us. 

It is not the enthusiasm of humanity that 
makes the Christian missionary; it did not 
make Jesus the Christ. It is no adequate 
explanation of Christ to say He incarnated 
the enthusiasm of humanity. St. Francis of 
Assisi, perhaps, did that more even than Jesus; 
and that is why with some he is more popular 
to-day. The missionary is not the servant of 

‘humanity; he is the servant of the holiness 


_ of God to humanity. He is the messenger of 


‘ the Cross because the Cross is the glorification, 
the revelation, of God’s holiness. It is holiness 


7... MISSIONARY’S STAYING POWER 231 


and not compassion that redeems. Pity only 
gives the desire, not the power, to redeem. It 
is human to pity sorrow, but it takes a diviner 
sense to pity sin. It is blessed to heal, but 
it is thrice blessed to redeem. The missionary \ 
is the agent of the Redeemer, not simply of 
the Friend of Man. His deepest motive is in the 
holiness which is the staying power in redeeming 
love. He must love the souls of men, but with 
the holy love of Christ. If he pity them, it is 
not chiefly because of their pain, their ignorance, 
their hardships, their oppression, their life of 
despair and fear, but it is a supernatural pity. 
It is because of their lack of the holiness 
which is God’s due, God’s glory and bliss. The 
enthusiasm of holiness may not be the ruling 
passion in every missionary, but it is the ruling 
passion of missions, of the missionary Church. 
In it lies their staying power. The people who 
have least sympathy with missions are the © 
people who have least sympathy with holiness. 
No man who is cool to missions is warm to 
the Holy One; his indifference to the one 
is a public confession of his insensibility to 
the other. A religion of kindness may have 
taken the place in him of a religion of holi- 
ness. The age that has lost the sense of God’s 
holiness, and therefore of man’s sin, is an age 


232 THE MISSIONARY’S STAYING PO 


of missionary difficulties which nothing but 


the restoration of that sense can help. The 
preacher of the Cross is the preacher of love, 


but it is not human love; it is love super- 


human, holy, incorruptible, and redeeming, love 
that loves mankind and nothing less, loves it 
for God’s holy sake, and loves no less than to 
the endless end. “As the father hath loved 
Me so have I loved you.” But the Father loved — 
Christ with the love of holiness, not the love 
of pity. And that is the soul of Christ’s love 
of souls, and so of the missionary’s love. It is 
only a holy love that could love mankind, could ~ 


love through all the distinctions of race and 


time, and all the disillusions of experience. It — 


was only a holy love that could be so stung 
and agonised with human sin as to destroy 
it and redeem us. It is the passion of pierced 
holiness that is the passion of the Cross. 


———_- 


Nothing short of holiness could save the ~ 


people from their sin. And nothing but the 
Holy Spirit could go with the word of com- 
plete redemption to every land and every 
man. That Britain should rule India is a great 
thing, a task so great that only the vast 
political genius of Britain and its vocation for 
rule could hope to succeed in it. But that 
Britain should convert India, redeem India, is 


4 


‘THE MISSIONARY’S STAYING POWER 233 


a far greater thing; and it is only to be hoped 
for by the spirit of holiness in Britain itself, 
redeeming her Empire and ruling her rule. 
We have seen in Christ a holiness the prophet 
did not know. It is not less solemn, it is not 
less sublime, but it is more sweet, it is more 
deep, it is more abiding. It is not a vision, but 
a presence and a power. We have seen through 
the smoke which filled the house. We have 
seen the face of Him that sat upon the 
throne. We have seen the Cross upon the altar. 
We have seen that the holiness of God is the 
holiness of love. There is no such awful gulf 
fixed between the King and the creature. We 
too are kings in Him. The word we hear is 
judgment indeed, and fear, but itis more. It is 
our judgment laid on the Holy. It is such 
mercy, pity, peace, and love. It is, indeed, 
infinite tenderness; but it is soul tenderness, it 
is moral tenderness, it is atoning, redeeming ten- 
derness. It is the tenderness of the Holy, which 
does not soothe but save. It is love which 
does not simply comfort, and it is holiness 
which does not simply doom. It is holy love, 
which judges, saves, forgives, cleanses the con- 
science, destroys the guilt, reorganises the race, 
and makes a new world from the ruins of the old. 
I will not plead with you for an interest in 


* 


234 THE MISSIONARY’S STAYING POW 


missions. If I could take you with me in the 
line and habit of thought I have been pur- 
suing, your interest in missions could not be 
quenched. It is useless to flog up a zeal for 
missions where we have lost the enthusiasm of 
the holy Cross, and live as if forgiveness were 
but an accident of religion, and only an occa- 
sional necessity in decent lives. But if our 
whole religion. be rooted in the forgiveness of 
the Cross, and our whole life shaped by the 
passionate sense that we owe ourselves to the 
world’s Redeemer, missions are not only safe, they 
will be a passion too, and a passion of the Church. 

A passion of the Church. I would lay stress 
on that. They are a work of the whole Church, 
as holy, prophetic, and apostolic. They are not 
a hobby of certain members or sections of the 
Church. Those who conduct them are not 


. 
tolerated and indulged by the Church as if they 


were faddists; they are its agents and repre- 


sentatives. We do not give them room merely, — 
but a mandate. The Church that has no mis- 
sions has no apostolic note, I would say no 
gospel. If ever in any Church culture, even 
Christian culture, gets the upper hand of the 
missionary spirit, that Church is losing its 
Gospel and is on the way to become an ethical } 
school, or a sentimental clique. 


- 


"THE MISSIONARY’S STAYING POWER 2385 


It is from the centre of the Church’s life 
that missions grow, from the holy love of God 
as revealed in the atoning Cross. They do 
not arise at some point in the outskirts of 
Christian faith; they are not among the 
Church’s luxuries. Christianity itself is in its 
nature a mission—a mission from Heaven to 
earth; and Christ Himself is the “ Apostle,” the 
Missionary, of our calling. To part with that 
idea is to reduce the Church to a society for 
mutual self-culture and agreeable piety. There 
are such forms of Christianity. There are, if 
not Churches, yet sections of the Church which 
are more interested in Christian culture than 
in the Christian evangel. There are groups of 
people who look with a tolerant eye on Chris- 
tian history, and especially on our first history, 
as an accommodation to a stage of spiritual 
growth which we have now passed. We have 
outgrown the apostolie stage, and have reached 
the cultured stage. Erasmus antiquates Luther. 
We have now, they say, the whole gathered 
wealth of the Church’s ethical and spiritual 
acquirement to live on, and we can look down 
with grateful patronage on those pushing and 
missionary eras which were natural to a 
certain crude stage of the soul. We can 
now recognise in all religions an unconscious 


236 THE MISSIONARY’S STAYING POWER 


Christianity which we may help to the top; 
but let us be careful (they urge) to develop 
other faiths to this end along their own lines. 
Do not let us obtrude the form of religion” 
which suits us; it does not suit the lower 
range of progress. Let the religious needs of 
the race shape themselves on evolutionary lines 
with what little help we can give. Our better 
faith is only better than theirs. It is not abso- 
lute, not final. All is relative. No informed man 
speaks of anything as absolute nowadays or as 
final. Christianity is but the chief of the best 
forms which the religious need and instinct have 
taken among men. It may itself be outgrown. 
Let it learn the modesty of that discovery ; let 
it not thrust itself upon other creeds; some of 
them were old when it was in its cradle. Let 
us develop our own creed among ourselves. 
Let us enrich our social charities. Let us 
pursue the sweet Christian pieties of the 
home, the fine sympathies of Christian litera-— 
ture, the refining influences of Christian art 
(the chamber music, so to say, of Christian 
accomplishment), the harmless recreations of 

the Christian Church, our gracious patronage © 
of the rudely earnest and the eagerly good. 
But let us not arrest and distort the benign 

influences of civilisation by obtrusive and 


ae 


= 


‘. 


THE MISSIONARY'’S STAYING POWER 237 


dogmatic gospels to people who could in some 
ways even evangelise us. 

Well, let it be clearly understood that these 
views, however amiable their advocates are, 
are not Christianity. They might represent a 
Christian coterie, but not a Christian Church. 
They may be cultured and refined, but they 
are not apostolic. The gospel is strained out 
of them. Jesus for them is a luminous point in 
history, not the Light of the world. For them 
He was the Teacher of a stage, not the Redeemer 
of all time and the King of all eternity, not 
the one permanent and comprehensive mission- 
ary from Heaven to earth, from God to man, 
from holiness to sin. He is not the living Word 
of God, the Holy One of the true Israel, the 
same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, equally 
rich to all that call, and able to save to the 
uttermost. But that is the gospel of the Church 
—the equal and absolute necessity of Christ for 
every age and for every soul, for every colour 
and for every clime. Where sin is there is the 
Saviour; where is the carcass there is the royal 
eagle; where Death is there is He that liveth 
for evermore and has Death’s keys and Death's 
doom. That is the gospel, whose word is the 
real prophetic legacy and the true apostolic 
succession. The old prophet grew into Christ’s 


238 THE MISSIONARY’S STAYING POWEE 


apostle; and the apostle was above all things 
a missionary. He was not a bishop but a 
witness, an evangeliser, an emissary, a mission- — 
ary of the Cross. The most apostolic Church ~ 
is the Church that is evangelical in the widest 
sense of the word. The apostolic succession is 
the evangelical succession. It is the gospel that 


—————— 


is the test of apostolicity ; it is not apostolicity — 
that is the test of the gospel. The apostles were 
such because of their relation to the gospel: — 
the gospel is not such because of its relation to 
the apostles. It is not the Church that makes 
the Word, it is the Word that makes the 
Church. The power of the Word does not 
depend on the correct position of the man 
who speaks it; but the man owes his position 
to the power of the Word. And that Word is 
Christ. The gospel is Christ and Him crucified. 
The missionary of the gospel is himself a 
crucified personality, for whom Christ was 
crucified, and who is crucified unto Christ, 
merciful, faithful, kindled, free, and wise. 

If the Church do not preach this gospel it 
ceases to be a Church. Its faith is not there 
for it to brood on but to declare. The Church 
is founded on Peter—on the rock of confession. 
This is the sense in which she is founded on 
apostles and prophets. It is not a case of 


THE MISSIONARY’S STAYING POWER 239 


Me 
; tracing an unbroken line from an apostle; the 

Church which chiefly does that confesses Peter 
_more than she reveals Peter’s Master. The 


- Church is founded on witnessing, on mission- 


_ ising, on the prophetic ministry, on the apostolic . 


note which loses even the apostle in the Saviour. 
Martyr, confessor, apostle, these are the true 
seed of the Church: and they all have this seal, 
the carrying out of the gospel in word and deed, 
at home or abroad. Not every member is a 
missionary, but every Church is a missionary ; 
and every member in so far as he shares the 
Church’s spirit and life in his prayer, sympathy, 
help. A faith unconfessed is a stifled faith 
which does not attain, does not arrive. With 
the heart we believe unto righteousness but 
with the mouth we confess unto salvation, 
which is righteousness made perfect. 

The Church is_the great confessor. And 


what the the C Church confesses i is | neither its “sin, 


nor its piety, nor its pity, but its its Saviour, its 
Holy One, its King. Its passion of holiness is not 
‘so much the passion to feel holy as to worship 
holiness and establish it. The permanent root 
of missions is not pietism but faith, not our 
sense of nearness to God but our faith in 
His nearness, His action for us and in us. 
What we confess is not our Christian experi- 


— 


ey 


; * me 
240 THE MISSIONARY’S STAYING POWER 


ence, nor our Christian attainment, nor our : 
Christian illumination. It is not of ourselves, — 
or our piety, or our orthodoxy that we witness. — 
It is of God’s grace, God’s salvation, God’s Christ, 
God’s work in Christ and His Cross, and His © 
Holy Spirit. It is of God’s loving will, saving 
purpose, and redeeming victory in Christ. We 
do not even confess our faith in the salvability 
of men but in the salvation of God. It is God’s 
to believe in the salvability of man, it is too 
much for men. We believe in it because God 
in Christ did: it is ours to believe and declare 
that God has saved and does save all who 
come through Christ unto Him. Confession 
is the Church’s word, even more than com- 
passion. The root of our missions is the faith 
of God’s salvation even more than the sense of 
man’s misery and need. The inspiration of 
Christian missions has been Christ's Cross more 
than man’s sorrow. With Buddhist missions 
it is otherwise, with modern philanthropy it 
may be otherwise. But Christian missions are 
‘the confession of the Cross of Christ in its aspect 
| of universality and its finality of moral power. 
' The spring of Christian energy is this pro- 
phetic passion to preach a holy Saviour, to 
confess Him in word or deed. It is the self- 
uttering instinct of faith—uttering itself, but 


: MISSIONARY’S STAYING POWER 241 


confessing its Saviour. It is faith energised 


_ with love, and love announcing its word to a 


world. It was to a race that the ancient 
prophet spoke, it was to a race he was sent. 
It was a common and corporate doom, and 
a common and corporate salvation. It is so 
with the Christian gospel. It is missionary 
because it is the salvation of the race and 
not of a group. It took a world’s salvation 
to save your soul. You are no poor thing. 
Christ’s work was the work of the race’s head, 
and it affected a whole race’s destiny. The 
goal was not a vast section of saved indivi- 
duals, but the salvation of a race of individuals. 
Whether that must mean all individuals is 
matter of dispute. But it does mean indivi- 
duals viewed as members of a race, a doomed 
race, a freed race, a redeemed race, a kingdom 
of priests unto God consecrated in Christ. 
There are some Christian activities that appear 
to go on satisfactorily, whether we keep very 
close to the Cross and its holiness or not. Some 
philanthropies even seem to prosper the less 


‘that is said in the Church about what means 


most for the Cross. The Church and Christian 

society teem with enterprises that are not 

much affected, to all appearance, whether 

people are in earnest with the Cross or no. 
Missions 17 


242 THE MISSIONARY’S STAYING POV 


They are fed and sustained by the homea ‘ 
and high-principled influences that proceed 
from words so wise, and a character so exalted, 
and love so kind as Christ’s. They ignore His 
words of judgment, His holy demands and 
charges that can only be reconciled with love by 
the atonement in the Cross. But this cannot be 
the case with missions. They are sure to suffer 
when the evangelical value of the Cross is 


, minimised. The great and pioneer missionaries 


have started from the Cross, from confession — 


' rather than compassion, from glory to Christ 


more than pity for men. It was the nature and 
the effect of the Cross, and Christ’s consequent 
claim, that became their inspiration. It was 
from these that they drew their power, and it 
was on these that they fed their patience. The 


f great pioneers that opened the missionary 


\ enterprise of last century were not men who 
/ arose in a humanitarian age, or even in an age 
' that could be quoted as a trophy of religious 


a 


| fervour. They were not among our colonists or 


seamen who had been in personal and pitiful 
contact with heathen vice or misery. They had 
somewhat vague notions of the actual condition © 
of heathen countries, nothing vivid or explicit — 
enough to raise pity to the power of a mis- 
sionary religion. What they felt most was the 


_ THE MISSIONARY’S STAYING POWER 243 


Cross, and the rights of the Cross, and Christ’s 
claim in it. They went preaching to the 
Gentiles, because it pleased God to reveal His 
Son in them (Gal. i. 16,17). Pity indeed they 
had, but it was not the soul of their enter- 
prise. Pity may be keen, but it is powerless 
without hope, and the gospel was the only world- 
hope, being the victory that had overcome the 
world (1 John vy. 4, R.V.). They did not arise as 
the organs of a bursting passion in the Church, 
to give a welcome and popular expression to its 
glowing faith. They were not carried on the 
crest of a wave; they had to fight their way, 
yea in the face of the Church itself. And they 
rather burst on that Church and age than burst 
from it. They had seen the Crucified; they had 
tasted the Gospel; they knew its nature, its 
supernatural power, its finished work; they had 
themselves felt its vital bondage; they yielded 
to its inspiration, they owned its eternal uni- 
versal scope. It was not their own experience 
that they trusted, but the nature of the Cross and 
its salvation. They knew its power even more 
than its piety. What they felt most was the 
wonder and glory of grace in the Cross, the tre- 
mendous triumph, the infinite claim, the right 
of Christ to the world He had won; it was not 
so much their own sanctity, or their own bliss, 


244 THE MISSIONARY’S STAYING POWE:! 


in it. It was not an introspective piety that ; 
led them and fed them. It was an objective 
power that urged them; it was not a subjective — 
dream that moved them. They did not follow a 
gleam. Piety has become a good deal more — 
subjective since then, with the risk of becoming | 
more thin. Itis of the kind that moves youth, 
perhaps, rather than the kind that sustains age. — 
It is interesting, charming, more than mighty. 
We feel the pathos of the heathen more than ~ 
the power of his Saviour. We think of the 
‘Cross as a boon to us more than a ransom, 
of what was given to us more than of what was 
paid for us there. Faith is of a kind to impel 
rather than to uphold, to prompt early enthusi- 
asms rather than to support them when the 
inevitable disenchantment arrives on contact 
with actual experience. It kindles the romance 
of missions rather than their obligation. It 
has a missionary piety, but not a missionary 
theology. It is less devoted to a deep study of 
the Bible, and more to fanciful interpretation. 
It is much impressed, but it does not pierce so 
deeply into the source of impression. It is 
delightful, but it is less powerful; consecrated 
in a way, but less sanctified, less sealed. It is 
an ardour of pious love more than a debt and 
principle of powerful faith. All which may help 


THE MISSIONARY’S STAYING POWER 245 


_ to explain both the missionary enthusiasm of 


to-day and its peculiar limitations and difficulties. 

Missions must thrive in the first degree upon , 
the objective power and holy nature of the Cross 
of Christ, and not upon subjective experiences 
or ardours. These may readily fail many a mis- 
sionary when, in solitude, the awful reality of 
his work comes home, stripped of every vestige 
of romance. It is then seen what the ruling 
quality of his faith has been. If it has been 
fanciful, merely pious, textual; if it has been 
secluded from the moral realism which comes 
from actual contact with the soul’s world, on 
the one hand, and with the Cross, as the 
moral reality of God’s own experience, on the 
other, if he do not find the Cross the moral 
key of the world—then it will go hard with 
his faith. And he will find much more plausi- 
bility in the critics of missions than is quite 
good for his own conduct of them. His re- 
sults are still outstanding, and the romance 
has faded away. The society of his brethren 
and the fellowship of a Church are denied him 
—he finds out then how precious these were— 
and he is cast upon the missionary idea alone 
and the missionary principle. In more Chris- 
tian words, he is thrown upon the missionary 
power and inspiration of the Cross itself, and 


be 


246 THE MISSIONARY’S STAYING PO 


its new creation, whether men hear or for- 
bear. He is committed by what the Redeemer 
has done. He has his orders, not in a text, 
but in a King, and in His kingdom, and in a — 
Cross that set it up. The Holy Spirit proceeds 
from the Cross more than from the Bible. And ~ 
in the trial, or it might be failure, of his own 
faith in human nature itself, the missionary is — 
compelled by a blessed force to fall back upon 
the Redeemer’s own dying faith in the work by 
which human destiny was secured. The first 
Missionary in the world was the Missionary to 
the world—who came forth from the Father to 
seek and save. Our faith is really, at the last 
pinch, a faith in His own. 

The missionary question is not whether the 
gospel is fitted for the inferior races; who, after 
actual contact with them, may seem to us more 
inferior than ever, and even hopeless. But 
it is whether the holy Christ Himself had 
faith in the human nature He read and re- 
deemed. With a faith in that faith of His 
we can go on, free to adopt all the measures 
and preferences that may be suggested by 
expediency in carrying out the work; only 


. not free to turn back, or sacrifice the gospel 


to any plausible or fashionable programmes 
of civilisation, whether they be exploiting 
schemes abroad or social reforms at home. 


THE GREATEST CREDITORS THE 
ye GREATEST DEBTORS 


“T am debtor both to Greeks and 
abated the wise and to the foolish.”—Roman 


THE GREATEST CREDITORS THE 
GREATEST DEBTORS 


HIS is a hard saying for human nature. It 

is peculiarly hard for the Englishman, 

whose frame of mind, ingrained for centuries, 
is “I am creditor to all the world.” 

But the text represents the only Christian 
frame. It represents the humility which Pro- 
testantism has so greatly lost. And it repre- 
sents the prophetic burden which makes bold 
apostles and a truly imperial Church. 

Especially in regard to missions, I lay stress 
on the fact that they lie on us, not simply as 
a duty but as a special kind of duty—a debt 
felt not only as obedience to a command but 
as a grateful sense of grace received. The real 
vitality of missions, I know, flows from those 
to whom they are a privilege. But some may 
feel them a command who do not feel them a 
privilege. And some may shrink from repudia- 


tion of a debt more even than from neglect of 
249 


NY in” 


250 THE GREATEST CREDITORS 


a duty. To some they are a joy, to some a duty 
of obedience to marching orders, to some a point 
of spiritual honour. 


say, and a debt is matter of obligation. We 
are free or not to take an interest in missions, 
but we are not free to pay or not pay a 
debt. 

Well, missions are voluntary in two senses— 
(1) as to a Church; (2) as to the individual. — 

1. A Church need not be very eager about 
them, and yet nobody will interfere with it. 
Society will not censure it; the law of the land 
will not compel payment of the missionary debt. 
Indeed, the politicians used often to find missions 
much in the way; they would gladly have been 
rid of them, as they are fertile sources of 
political trouble. In reference to the law of the 
land they are quite voluntary, of course. Bul 
before the law of the kingdom of God they are’ 
not. They are compulsory, even by a law of se d 
preservation. A Church which is not missionary 
will soon cease to be a Church. It has lost the 
Holy Spirit. It has lost the Cross as a living 
power. A Church cold to missions is a Church 
dead to the Cross. It may have religion, 
but not the Gospel. It may have Christian 
sympathies, good music, intelligent views, social 


THE GREATEST DEBTORS 251 


ae friendliness, excellent intentions, but not the 
_ power of the Gospel. Where the spirit of the 
_ Cross is there is the pressure of spiritual debt 
and Christian chivalry; there is the need for 
a spiritual outlet, the passion of Christian 
colonising, the passion to cover the world with 
the spiritual nationality of the Cross and 
spiritual settlements of Churches. Missions are 
compulsory in a Church by its own high law 
if it is to remain a Church. By the law of 
spiritual life the missionless Church betrays that 
_ itis a crossless Church; and it becomes a faith- 
less Church, an unblest Church, a mere religious 
society, and finally, perhaps a mere cultured 
clique. For a Church missions are not voluntary. 
The Church which is out of sympathy with 
spiritual conquest perishes. A Church’s missions 
are part of its instinct of self-preservation—to 
put it on the lowest ground. But they are also 
a point of spiritual honour. They are part of 
the higher, finer debt. The richer the Church 
is in the Spirit the greater is the pressure of this 
debt. Earthly debts press because of poverty, 
the heavenly debt presses because we are rich, 
because we richly feel what we owe, and much 
i is required because much is given. The greatest 
possession of the soul is its debt; it is to feel 
what it owes. That is the one healthy Church 


252  #$THE GREATEST CREDITORS ~ ’ 


debt. The great wealth of the Church is an 
exuberant sense that it owes everything, and 
owes it to Christ. 

Missions are not an accident of the Church’s 
life therefore; they belong to its essence. They 
are not worked alongside the Church, but by 
the Church. A Church may be neutral to 
politics, but no Church can be neutral to 
missions. They are an integral part of its 
life; they are not outside its necessary organi- 
sations. As a Church we have no right to 
be spectators of missions, we must be auxili- 
aries. And the missionary societies are not 
merely in a similar line of business with the 
Churches, only with another market, but they 
are branches of the same business and kept up 
by the same Power. 

2. And missions are voluntary in another 
sense—in reference to the individual. You may 
not take an active part yourself in the missionary 
work of your Church, home or foreign. Most 
people cannot. And there is nobody who can 
say to you, You must. Even the apostolic 
preacher with the missionary soul cannot 
always honestly and wisely say that to every 
individual. Everybody is not fitted for such 
work. So it is voluntary as far at least as your 


———ee eee 


neighbour’s pressure is concerned. It would be 


—e 


THE GREATEST DEBTORS 253 


an invasion of your Christian freedom, it would 
be usurping God’s call, to say to you, “ Woe is 
you if you preach not to the heathen. You 
_ must evangelise.” No man may compel you by 
_ the threat of religious discredit to evangelise, 
to take to street preaching, house visitation, 
tract giving, and the like; that is between 
you and your soul, you and the Spirit, you 
and God’s call. But for all that, even for 
the individual Christian, missions are not 
voluntary if you mean that before Christ he 
may or may not be interested just as he likes. 
He must be interested ; he must support them. 
It is an evasion to say that missions are 
so badly conducted that you cannot support 
them and need not be interested. You are 
bound by your Christianity to be interested 
in the missionary idea, the missionary principle, 
the missionary spirit, the missionary enterprise. 
Not to be interested would be to confess that 
you did not understand your own creed. You 
may criticise methods, and you ought to do so 
from time to time; but it must be from inside, 
as sympathisers, not as mere critics and 
journalists; it must be as helpers of those who 
are responsible for methods. The critic of 
missions who is only a critic is a critic who 
may be ignored without serious loss. 


254 THE GREATEST CREDITORS 


There are some Christians, I fear, who look 
on missions as a particular religious hobby 
(like what vegetarianism might be to some, r 
Socialism, or any other “ism”), Many regard 
them as a fad, like a craze for collecting ebony. 
And they are willing enough to humour in a 
good-natured way the Christians who ride this 
hobby; but they repudiate it as a debt pressing 
on them. That is quite wrong, quite a miscon- 
ception of the Christian position. Missions 
are a debt on every Christian individual so far 
as sympathy, prayer, and some kind of support. 
go. Those who take an active part in them 
are acting on behalf of these who do not. They 
are their deputies, agents, representatives; they 4 
are not hobbyists. They lay us under obligation. — 
We have a debt to them. They are the Church's 
pioneers, colonists, ambassadors, hands, feet, and — 
tongues. They act for the other parts of the { 
body. They are not to be examined curiously, 
criticised coldly, or indulged contemptuously, © 
like a baby wondering at its toes. Nor as if 
missionaries were a sort of religious collectors” 
of black images or foreign stamps, as if | 
they were spiritual orchid-hunters in tropical 
countries. But they are the agents of the 
Church; and they represent in the Church’s 
essential work every member of the Church, 


a 
£ 


: 
_ every man who calls himself a Christian. They 
have a claim upon us in Christ’s name. If you 


THE GREATEST DEBTORS 255 


_ really take Christ’s faith and service in earnest, 
missions are a real part of your debt to Him. 


It is optional with you whether you go and 


become a missionary; but you are not left free 
by the Cross of Christ as to whether you will 
sympathise with missions and support them or 


not. Every member of a Christian Church, yea, 


of a Christian congregation, should contribute 
something to missions, whether in prayer, work, 
or means. 

We are debtors, then (to gather up what I 
have been saying), to the missionary cause. The 
Church is not free to make it a mere voluntary 
matter, nor to make an interest in missions 
a matter of condescension and supererogation. 
It is not optional to pay our debts, nor is it 
condescending to a troublesome social prejudice; 
it is a matter of honour. Missions are a matter 
of Christian honour, just as they have been the 
field of Christian chivalry. The man who 
repudiates his debts is bankrupt; the Church 
that disavows missionary sympathy is bank- 
rupt in evangelical grace and universal faith. 
The decay of evangelical faith is fatal to 
missions. 

Take the case of the apostle himself. We may 


was spiritually so great because he lived under 
the habitual sense of obligation, of spiritt al 
debt. His whole life was its payment. He was 
not his own; he was Christ’s. He took Christ 
for a career. “For me to live is Christ.” It 
was impossible for him to go out of Christ's 
service. It would have been spiritual suicide 
to retire to the world. He lived in a sublime 
and glorious solitude of devotedness. He was 
a lonely debtor in a world of repudiators; 
and his work, his service, the payment of his 
debt, was a joy because he had Christ for his 
moral Creditor. ; 

His debt lay in three things. 

1. It lay first in his redemption. Christ 
had loved him and given Himself for him. | 
Christ had bought him with a price. He was | 
not his own. He could not withhold himself 
without defrauding his Saviour. Christ had 
given His whole self for him, and given it to 
the uttermost. Paul could not give so much 
even when he gave his whole self. But his 
whole self was all he had, and he gave it. It 
was what his Saviour asked. So he sold him- 
self to Christ as His bond slave, and passed 
under His yoke into glorious freedom. For 


ae) 


THE GREATEST DEBTORS O57 


Christ had ransomed him when sold under sin 
to death. 

2. But secondly Paul’s debt lay not only in 
his general call to be a Christian but in his 
special call to be an apostle, not in his redemp- 
tion only but in his vocation. A special revela- 
tion of the gospel was given him, one denied 
to the other apostles, one vaster, profounder, 
more sweeping, more unsparing, than theirs. 
And the special feature of that revelation was 
just the element in the Cross that made it 
universal—grace freer than love and wider than 
sin. He was made to see the huge truth hidden 
from the rest that it was only the Cross that 
made Christ and Christianity universal. So it 
drove him by its very nature out into the whole 
world where men lived, loved, sinned, and died. 
His gospel made him a vagrant, but it was the 
ordered vagrancy of the stars in heaven; and 
it made him homeless, but it was the homeless- 
ness of one who, by God’s fatherly grace, had 
become domesticated in the whole creation, and 
found his domicile in the new world brought to 
light by Christ. A pulpit charge was given him 
with a world-wide parish, an universal ministry. 
The stewardship of the true Cross was put into 
his hands in trust for the world, for the future, 


for Christ and His kingdom. He gave himself 
Missions 18 


oT. 


258 THE GREATEST CREDITORS si 


and his career willingly to Christ's gospel and 
its career. As Christ identified Himself with 
God’s purpose so did Paul with Christ's; and he 
had his reward. He says so himself. But even 
if he had not done his work willingly and found 
his joy in it, yet do it he must. The debt must 
be paid, the trust discharged, the call obeyed. 
For he goes on in the same passage to say: 
“Tf I doit against my will it is still a steward- 
ship that has been committed to me. Woe is 
me if I preach not the Gospel” (1 Cor. ix. 16, 1 

Paul had a debt to Christ both as a Christian 
in his redemption and as an apostle in his call; 
and in the service of the heathen, of the 
humblest Christian, he was paying that debt 
to Christ which he could never pay. 

3. And thirdly, it was a debt from another 
point of view as well. He owed Christ amends. 
There was a negative impulse, so to say, a 
negative obligation. There was an obligation 
of reaction, an obligation of compensation. He 
had been Christ’s persecutor, and he must now — 
be Christ’s prophet. It was an atonement in 
Paul to preach the Atonement. He had a 
double debt to the Church he had ravaged. | 
Because he had ravaged he must reconcile more 
than the rest. His old havoc committed him 
doubly to the ministry of help. His old narrow: — 


_- . 


THE GREATEST DEBTORS 259 


ness had to be made good by an equal passion 


for a universal gospel. He had a debt to his 
own blind past. It was to spread the light. 
He owed its payment to Jew and Greek alike. 

Now, a like threefold debt lies on the Church 
to-day—a debt that only its missionary energy 
can pay. 

1. We owe it, like Paul, first to our re- 
demption. The Church is the company of the 
redeemed. We are not our own. We owe 
ourselves, our souls, their confession, their 
service, their word of gospel. The Church 
owes itself to Christ, and, in Christ's name, 
to the world He died for. We have a posses- 
sion the world has not. It is a possession 
which it is alike death to lose and death to 
hoard. To hoard is to lose. To hide this life 
is to kill it. To monopolise it is to starve it. 
To hug it is to smother it. Just to repose on 
it is to overlay it. But to scatter it is to in- 
crease it. It is ours as a trust. As we owe 
ourselves to Christ we owe His gospel to the 
world. We are redeemed from the world, but 
it is for the world; we are free of men to be 
the servants of men. If it is really life that we 
have it is life we must give. If we give nothing 
is it rash to infer we have nothing? If the 
Church do not spread out into the world can 


260 THE GREATEST CREDITORS 


we say that the gospel of the Cross has spree d 
into the Church? If the Church do not annex 
the world, the world will annex the Church. 
We can only pay the debt of our redemption 
by energies that redeem. We own the Cross "7 
spreading its power. 

2. But the Church is also called as Paul was 
to an apostolate for its life. It is an “apostolic” 7 
Church. That does not mean episcopal succes- 
sion. It means evangelical succession. It means — 
that the Church is the trustee of the apostolic 
work, the channel of the apostolic gospel, the 
organ of the same spirit as made the apostles, 
the vehicle of the apostolic deposit for the world. 
The Church is the great impersonal collective 
apostle of history. It has received the same 
special call as Paul. It has a wealth of positive 
revelation from the Cross. It has seen in the 
Cross a principle, power, and glory far more 
than national, and more than epoch-making, | 
which will not be satisfied with less than the 
redemption and the fulness of the whole earth. — 
The Church is the organ created by God, and 
equipped, for the conversion of all nations. If 
Christ is to rule all lands, it can only be through © 
the missionary apostolate of the Church. I wish — 
the apostolicity of the Church were more em- | 
phasised rather than less. Only let it be under- 


r THE GREATEST DEBTORS 261 


stood. The chief apostle is not the Roman Vicar 
of Christ, nor the Anglican administrator, but 
the missionary of Christ. He does not represent 


the kingship of the Cross but its servitude. 


Let the Church be more apostolic so long as 


that means more laden with the sense of debt, 


more serviceable and less dominant, more full 
of sacrifice than ascendency, more filled with 
the reality of redemption, more mighty with the 
moral power of it, more anointed with the 
unction of its call, more urged by the necessity 
of its mission, more, and not less, inspired with 
a sense of apostolic privilege. What is that 
privilege? The privilege of being a wanderer, 
a stranger, a sojourner, for Christ’s sake and 
His gospel’s, upon the face of the earth. The 
Church that has settled in on good terms with 
the world and society has ceased to be apostolic, 
though it could trace its bishops by the clearest 
title to Peter or Paul. Let us press into the 
nature of the Cross, into its distinctive secret. 
The Cross and its sufferings is the High School 
of Christianity. The Cross and its victory is the 
charter of the Church. The Church that goes 
deepest into the Cross, that lives most on the 
Cross, is the Church that shall draw all nations 
into it. The Church that most feels the release 
of the Cross will most feel the obligation of it. 


262 THE GREATEST CREDITORS 


To whom it comes most as an emancipation, to 
him it comes mightily as a compulsion. The 
passion of this liberty constrains men. We are 
bought out of a debt of guilt which we could 
never begin to pay into a debt of love we can 
never cease to pay. Our prison is opened that 
we may go bound in the spirit over all the world. 
“Though I be free from all men,” says Paul, 
“yet have I made myself servant to all.” Oh! 
our apostolic privilege is not episcopal preroga- 
tive but missionary pre-eminence; and the real 
endowment of a truly wealthy Church is the 
laborious sense of inexhaustible debt. This is 
the only sense, I say, in which debt is good for 
a Church. . 
3. But missions are a debt on the Church, as — 
on the apostle, by way of amends, not only 
because of what Christ has done for it but 
because of what it has done against Christ. It 
owes Christ amends which only missions can 
pay. There are cases where the policy of 
persecution in the Church has robbed Christ — 
of fruit that He should now enjoy. There have 
been whole Churches and ages where the spirit | 
of conquest, the greed of plunder, the lust of 
power, and the horrors of persecution haye 
taken from Christ wide lands and souls in- 
numerable that should have been His. I need 


THE GREATEST DEBTORS 263 


only mention the action of the Roman Church 
in connection with the Spanish conquest of 
America, its treatment of the natives, more 
Mohammedan than Christian, more of the sword 
than the gospel. Had South America received 
the same Christianity as North do you not 
think both Christ and the world would have 
been the richer to-day? You will tell me, if 
you read the recent historians, that it was the 
Empire, the State, that really persecuted, not 
the Church. But why did the Church not teach 
it better? Why did she consent to profit by 
such persecution? Again, the masses of Europe 
are hard and almost impossible to evangelise 
to-day. Why? For one reason because of the 
persecuting spirit of the Church in Europe, both 
Catholic and Protestant, for so many centuries. 
Would Europe be the armed camp it is to-day, 
or the hot-bed of revolution, if the Church of 
the last several centuries had been as earnest 
about evangelising as about conformity? Would 
not England be another place had that been so ? 
Did the Methodists not go far to save England 
by delivering evangelicals from conformity? 
Why have they stopped half-way? We have 
infinite amends to make Christ for our persecu- 
tion of Him in the name of religion. Yes, 
religion owes Christianity infinite amends. 


oe) 
<ehe 
RSE 


264 THE GREATEST CREDITORS 


And we owe not only for our persecution but 
also for our neglect when there was no perse- 
cution. We have arrears to make up as well 
as amends. We are defaulters even when not 
enemies. We have kept what it was our duty 
to give. We have hung back when we should 
have gone forward. We have not only done 
positive harm to Christ by wrong methods but 
we have denied Him His own by having na 
methods, by not acting at all. Where were 


’ 
Protestant missions till a hundred years ago? ; 

i 
Was there nothing owed to Christ abroad then ? 


Were the dynastic wars and buccaneering con-— 


quests of Christian Europe the expansion of 
the kingdom of Christ? The expansion of 
England—was that an energy of Christian 
extension? The acts and results of the East 
India Company in Hindostan—were these in 
any sense missionary? Was Clive the apostolic 
forerunner of Carey? Were Clive’s methods a 
preparation of the gospel? Why, till a little 
over a century ago the only missionaries from 
modern Europe were the Jesuits. Let that be 
said to their honour, whatever we think of their 
principles and methods. We are debtors for a 
long neglect, a long parsimony of the gospel. 
The policy of Christian lands to the rest of the 
world for centuries was not give but grasp. It 


; THE GREATEST DEBTORS 265 
: 


is too much so still; but the giving increases. 
The missionary spirit is active in many forms. 
We have begun to pay our fathers’ debts, to 
meet our entail of Christian responsibilities. 
But we are not half awake yet. We do not feel 
the debt as we must. We have heard of the 
damnation of the heathen, but we have not 
heard enough of the condemnation of those who 
left them heathen. A Sioux Indian said to the 
missionary, “How long have the white men 
known this?” When he was answered, he went 
on, “ Why did you not tell us before? The 
great Spirit will not punish us for our ignorance, 
but you for your neglect.” 

And when we have not persecuted, or 
neglected, the heathen we have exploited them. 
We have been careless what became of them, 
provided we made fortunes out of them. We 
have done worse, we have introduced our curses 
and vices amongst them. We have not only 
given them stones for bread, but when they 
asked for an egg we have given them a scorpion. 
We have stung and poisoned them with vile 
liquor, horrible and shameful diseases, gun- 
powder, the slave-trade, blackbirding, treachery, 
and general contempt. And even when we have 
done none of these vile things we have under- 
mined and discredited their old faith without 


266 THE GREATEST CREDITORS 


giving them new. Oh! we Christian lands have 
an awful debt to cancel. Do not say they were 
bad before and welcomed our vice. Many were 
not. Some were finer people than the European 
scum that ruined them, or many of the Christian 
traders that fattened on their fall. But if they 
had not been worthy, if they had been prone to 
evil, it was our business to fortify and raise 
them. It was not needful to ruin them in order 
to trade with them. Honest trade would have 
made them honest, and kindly justice would 
have made them kind. Yes, we have an awful ; 
debt to cancel. We have begun to do it—God j 
only knows if it be too late. We of England q 
have an immense colonial and commercial 
empire. We have gathered and stored from 
the earth more than any other people. Does 
not our responsibility correspond? Do we not — 
owe the world more? Are not the greatest — 
creditors really the greatest debtors to society? — 
Our immense gain becomes an immense debt. 
Honest dealing is but the least of our obliga- 
tions. A share in our own Christian secret is 
our real debt. We must turn upon the heathen 
the same pity and blessing which Christianity 
has evoked within our own land, between our 
own people. For a Christian people with an 
imperial place all social missions at home must 


THE GREATEST DEBTORS 267 


be balanced by evangelical missions abroad. 
It is our Christianity after all that has been 
the secret of our prosperity. It was the Church 
that created the English realm. It is our Chris- 
tianity that has led us on, and, by Puritanism 
in one century and Evangelicalism in another, 
saved us from the bloody revolutions and social 
catastrophes which set back the clock for gene- 
rations in other lands. And it was Christianity 
_ that gave us civilisation at the very first by an 
Italian mission. All our greed and conquest 
have not destroyed the Christian marrow of 
our land. And we awake to the fact that 
England was cradled in Christianity and can 
only live in this native air. 

Yes, England was cradled in Christianity. 
We owe ourselves to missions. That is another 
source of missionary debt. We owe missions 
to others because we are due to them our- 
selves. It was missions from other lands 
and another faith that made us what we are. 
I have just said that it was the new religion, 
imported from abroad, that was the founda- 
tion of our English civilisation and history. 
The English State was made possible by the 
Church in England. We were heathen when 
the Culdee monks evangelised us, when Augus- 
tine found us. We owe our own gospel in 


268 THE GREATEST CREDITORS 


England to Ireland and Iona and Italy. We 
are bound to repay it to India and China. Our 
missions there are but passing on the torch that 
was lighted in us by a foreign mission. We 
received from Judea and the Mediterranean 
the faith which we return to Africa and the 
South Seas. If we are the greatest power in 
the world, we owe so much the more to the 
influence that made us. The greatest creditors, 
I say, are ever the greatest debtors. The richest 
men owe most to the community that made . 
their wealth possible. We who once were 
barbarians have become the home of more 
than Greek culture, and we are so much the : 
more debtors both to Greek and barbarian. | 
And if we have no power to feel a gratitude 7 
like that, it means that we are lower in the 
scale of moral culture than we think; it means 
that we disown our past, that it moves us not. 
We do not respond to it; we respond to 
nothing but the near and immediate interests 
which the barbarian can feel as well as we. 
The mark of true culture surely is noblesse oblige, 
the power to respond to the larger, remoter, 
finer obligations, and to own in what we give the 
call of what made us and gave us giving power. 
The Church has the right to evangelise, she 
has the duty, but above all she has the power. 


a 
' THE GREATEST DEBTORS 269 


In the Holy Ghost she has it, not in the perfec- 
tion or fidelity of the Church. Missions are not 
there to advertise the Church, nor to offer it as 
an example, but to proclaim the gospel. Nor 
must the anomalies, the inconsistencies, of the 
Church arrest its word. It will never get over 
its defects but by discharging its trust, and 
spreading its word, and increasing its power— 
the power of the Holy Ghost, intelligible only 
to Christian experience, but there mightily. 
We have a twofold gift—the word of the gospel 
in the Bible, and the word of faith in our 
Christian experience and life, overcoming the 
world in more senses than one. 

Now, all my opening considerations are very 
real, but I have no great hope that they will have 
practical effect by themselves—not till they are 
rooted in this Christian experience, energised by 
our personal debt to Christ. The missionary 
spirit is not bred in the atmosphere of speeches, 
or even sermons, but in the secret, silent place 
where our spirit rejoices in God our Saviour. 
The social memory is short, and missions can- 
not live on a sense of national indebtedness to 
past influences. Culture feels and recognises 
that debt, but it does not produce or animate 
missions. These flow from the soul’s inmost re- 
ligion, the Church’s worshipping sense of owing 


270 THE GREATEST CREDITORS. 


itself to its Saviour. They flow from the debt ve | 
personally owe to Christ, tt ane mission ar y 


not in their gratitude to our missionaries but 
in the devotion called out to the Redeemer ; as 
our hope for the Church at home is not in its 
appreciation of the ministers of the present or 
the heroes of the past but in its response to 
the Saviour. The debt we really owe is due not 
merely to benefactors in the past, even our 
souls’ benefactors. Our missionary response is 
not kept alive by appreciation of the prophe s 
and martyrs of truth, piety, justice, and pro- 
gress. Nay, it is to no mere historic person 
at all that we owe ourselves. Our one per- 
manent benefaction is our redemption. We 
are the beneficiaries of eternity. The powe 7 
that claims and saves us is from beyond history, | 
from before the foundation of the world. The 
first missionary was God the Father, who sent — 
forth His Son in the likeness of sinful flesh. 
That is the seal and final ground of missions— 
the grace, the ultimate, unbought, overwhelm- 
ing grace of God, the eternal heart and purpose 
of the Father, who gave us not only a prophet 
but a propitiation. The second missionary was 


THE GREATEST DEBTORS 271 


that Son, the apostle of our profession as the 
New Testament calls Him, the true primate of 
the apostles, of those that He sent forth who 
himself came forth from the bosom of the 
Father to declare Him; who exiled and emptied 
Himself in this foreign land of earth, and 
humbled Himself to death, even the death of 
the Cross. And the third missionary is the 
Holy Ghost, whom the Saviour sends forth 
into all the earth, who comes mightily and 
sweetly ordering all things, and subduing all 
lands to the obedience of the kingdom of 
Christ. And the fourth missionary is the 
Church. And these four missionaries are all 
involved in the one Divine redemption to 
which we owe ourselves utterly, which is the 
ground of the divinest claims on us, and makes 
us debtors, and nothing but debtors, for ever 
and ever. It is not to Jew, Greek, or barbarian 
that we owe our soul and service, not even to 
the mere historic Jesus or to the redeeming 
idea. But we are debtors, wholly and always 
debtors, because we owe ourselves, our faith, 
hope, and eternal destiny to the eternal God 
redeeming us to His eternal self in Father, Son, 
and Holy Ghost. These go forth into each 
other, into all the world, into the depths of the 
soul, And the soul is saved in going forth 


‘ Hii 
en ae 


272 THE GREATEST CREDITORS 


through it in love, sacrifice, and blessing to @ 
the world. 


high holy place—as God judges and corrects” 
them, and guides them to new methods, throug 
new problems, with new power. 

If our Christian public is losing grasp and 
taste of these things, how can missions live? 
How can we evangelise? We may go on for 
a while to heal, but how can we save? | 

An eviscerated Christianity can never keep | 
missions going. It could never have founded — 
them. A diluted Christianity cannot sustain” 
them. A sentimentalised Christianity cannot, — 
nor a bustling Christianity, nor a Christianity — 
which sacrifices everything to orthodoxy. A 
Christianity that does not regard Christ as the 
Son of God in the real full sense, as the God of 7 
grace, redeeming and reconciling the world, — 
will never be ardent about missions. We have 
neither right nor power to evangelise the world i 
unless Christ is the final and absolute revelation ~ 
of God’s purpose. Buddhism has lost its power 
to develop new life. It is a religion of de- 
cadence. Islam has but conservative or destruc- — 


THE GREATEST DEBTORS 273 


tive power, or power only to lift tribes to the 
first stage of civilisation. Only Christianity 
remains, because Christ remains our Eternal 
life—the self-revelation of a saving God. 
Christianity is no more parallel with other 
religions than God is with other powers— 


“Tt gives a light to every age— 
It gives but borrows none.” 


Here at last we have God, and a full, final 
God. He has spoken authentically in His Son. 
Christianity is no religious phase or stage. God 
has spoken His last word in Christ. And it is 
the word of the Cross to human sin—that is, 
to humanity at its creative moral centre. It 
is Christ, and Christ not as the hero nor as the 
lover of men but as the Redeemer, the incar- 
nate grace of God. 


PRAYER. 


Thou, O Lord most high, sayest, Come and 
Go. So teach us to come, and so receive us 
as we come, that we may mightily go. Spirit, 
that went forth creating and redeeming, come 
to us still. Bear in on us the Cross with its 
power and its burden, its preciousness but also 
its stewardship. Humble us to feel ourselves 

Missions 19 


274 THE GREATEST CREDITORS 


infinite debtors. We sacrifice much for out 
passions and opinions; raise us, we pray, te 
sacrifice still more for our faith. We confess 
our deep neglect and disunion; stir and unite 
us by Thy missionary service to newness of 
life. 

We bless Thee for what Thy apostles have 
done for our land. Still do Thou reclaim our 
heathenism. Convert what is pagan in every 
soul. Save our empire for Thy world-salvation, 
Use us for Thy kingdom; and place us in it 


our hope—through Jesus Christ our Lord. 
Amen. 


, 
poi 


ne he: 


Pee 


> 


5 
"ne 


“As I please all men in all things, no 
profit, but the profit of many, that they 
ye imitators of me, as I also am of Chris 
x. 33-xi. 1. 


A MISSIONARY MODEL 


AUL did not hesitate on occasion to set 
himself up for an example. But only 

a man devoid of self-seeking could do this 
without offence. And the secret is in his own 
obedience—* As I am of Christ.” He did 
claim an authority—strange as that may seem 
to some to-day; but it was on the strength 
of his own obedience, and of his obedience to 
the gospel which procured the salvation of men. 
It was authority, not episcopal but apostolic, 
in the sense of a real spiritual father. He was 
no tutor in Christ, nor merely a brother, but 
a father. That was his missionary relation 
to the Churches. It meant authority based on 
spiritual obligation, on his place in their new 
creation, and his work in the new Israel. He 
felt, as every true preacher in some measure 
feels, that he could do nothing with a Church 
who did not care for his spiritual work in their 


souls more than for anything else. 
a77 


278 A MISSIONARY MODEL 


Under the light of this example let us consider 
some features in the missionary action of Paul 
the typical missionary. ) 

1. He broke new ground. He did not go 
where other apostles were at work. . 

This was all of a piece with the independence 


i 
and originality of his genius and gospel. His — 


was the same gospel as the rest had, yet how q 
original to him! He broke new ground in 
thought, and faith, and in work as well. Yet 
he obtruded his work on no other man’s, and 
built on no other's foundation. 


pe 


There is a proper understanding with Pro- 
testant missions to respect each other's field. — 
The London Missionary Society, for instance, 


= Ss 


has no mission in Japan, because of an under- 

standing with the American Board of Missions. 

The same policy should prevail everywhere. 
Immense harm is done by the intrusion of 


. 
‘ 


—_— 


Roman Catholic and Anglican missions where 
others are. The confusion to the heathen is 
great, and the offence to Christian brethren — 
is great no less. . 
2. He was utterly without selfish regards. or — 
love of power. He had no vanity, no amour — 
propre. True, Paul had a certain pride in being — 
independent of his Churches, so that none could 
say he sought theirs but them. He supported 


_- 


A MISSIONARY MODEL 279 


himself; it was part of his _ self-devotion. 
Nothing more hinders Christian work than 
self-love, self-seeking, lack of self- erasure, 
even among those who are capable of self- 
sacrifice. It is especially so in missions. Self- 
devotion, and not merely self-sacrifice, is the 
real way to reach the heathen. For this reason 
settled missionaries are best, not vagrant. They 
identify themselves with the peoples to whom 
they go. And how the missionaries do lose 
themselves to the people! Traders go to make 
fortunes and return home to enjoy them. But 
missionaries usually grow into their people, 
and when on furlough are often restless to get 
back. What a pathetic sight was that of 
John Chalmers, aged and widowed, returning 
to China to end his days where his heart was 
also! Why then, it is said, do missionaries not 
range the world now in Paul's self-supporting 
way? Yes, so that the Church at home shall 
look on, and cheer the baptisms, and grumble 
when there are none! How easy it is to de- 
mand martyrdoms! If individuals choose to 
take this devoted kind of work up, well and 
good, but no Church has any right to demand it. 
What would be the spiritual condition of a Church 
which sat in comfort and watched individual 
Christians at their missionary privations ? 


280 A MISSIONARY MODEL 


And besides, missions are an affair of # 
Church, and not merely of lone volunteers. 
The interest of the Church should be at leas 7 
half missionary. It has to extend as well as 


tian men and women. Organised missionaries 
cannot .act in the same way as an independent 
apostle. If a Church ask why more do not go 
out as heroic pioneers the reply is, Why do 
not the Churches produce them? But perhaps 
Churches do not produce apostles ; only Christ 
does. And apostles produce Churches —like 
Luther, Wesley, and many pioneers. Perhaps 
all that the Churches can produce is agents. . 

But when Christ produces apostles he gives 
them to the Church. Even so independent an 
apostle as Paul asked for a supplementary 4 
mandate from the Church, and arranged © 
his field with the Church. He had his 
commission from Christ, but asked a mandate 
from the Church, with which also he was 
in business contact from time to time. It was — 
no mere private adventure even with him. 
On the one hand, missions are an act of the 
Church ; on the other, it is by such apostolic | q 


A MISSIONARY MODEL 281 


methods the Church works. On the one hand, 
I say, missions are an act of the Church. The 
Church, even in a Paul, is the acting subject in 
missions—just because Christ is the great Agent 
behind all, and Christ is mightier in the Church 
than in any individual. On the other hand, the 
Church works by apostolic agents and methods. 
It has missions, and not a mere propaganda. 
Judaism had a propaganda. It spread its 
influence by proselytism from individual to 
individual. One said to another, “Come with 
us, and we will do you good.” It brought in 
members by plucking their sleeve. But this 
was not missions as Christianity understands 
the word. The propaganda was not a duty, and 
if it had been, certainly not the duty of the 
community. The synagogue spread secretly, in- 
cidentally ; it was assertive, but not aggressive. 
But the spread of the Church was a purposed 
and essential part of its genius as the community 
of the gospel. It spread by apostolic preaching 
rather than individual propagandism. And so it 
became a world Church, and the synagogue did 
not, as the non-evangelical sects do not. And 
this was because the genius of the gospel, and 
its love, took the choice out of the Church’s 
hand, and it must preach the gospel for its life. 

3. Paul was flexible in his personal dealings 


282 A MISSIONARY MODEL - 


with the heathen. He was all things to al 
men—a time-server ; but not in the bad sens 
in the noble sense. He was no flatterer, 
schemer; he was not tolerant of pagan im 
moralities or gross modes of worship. But it 
all things indifferent he would leave the heathen 
to their tastes and usage. He would speak their 
speech, adopt, as far as possible, their way 7 
of life, meet their sympathies and needs, and 
interest them with the judgment and ingenuity 
of love. 

A missionary in China settled in a village and 
preached every evening in a little chapel there. 
During the day he sat in the porch. A China- 
man went by, and the missionary asked him 
to sit beside him and smoke. He talked to 
him for three hours about Huropean trains, 
cities, telegraphs, and the like. The man came ; 
to the sermon, peeping in at the door, the next 
day he entered, and in four months’ time he 
was baptized, with his two sons. It is a com- 
mon story. 

4, Paul tried to set his converts on their o 
feet as soon as possible. He made them in- 
dependent Churches, and developed and guided 
their native talent and sacrifice, even for the 
support of other Churches, especially the Jeru- 


salem Church, ruined by its communist fiasco. 


A MISSIONARY MODEL 283 


_ So it is with the best modern missions. We 
see native pastors building their own Churches 
and schools instead of having them built at 
the cost of societies ; we see them even raising 
contributions for other missions. The European 
missionary becomes then a bishop of several 
native Churches, visiting, sending letters and 
messages, and exercising a paternal control, 
which relaxes as his children come of age. 

5. Where Paul was inflexible in anything he 
started from the Cross of Christ. His was a 
very positive Christianity. It had the Cross of 

Christ for the turning point of the world. Paul 
was made a missionary by that which made 
him a Christian. If any Christian had told 
Paul he had no interest in missions, Paul would 
have told him he was no Christian, and had no 


interest in Christ. It was a world-wide Christ .~ 


or none for Paul. If his missionary activity 
had flagged, he would have considered his faith 
flagged. It was another faith if it did not 
spread itself, if it did not make the soul sigh 
for the world. And the Church’s interest in 
missions is the standard of its real interest 
in the Cross. You may be religious and feel 
or show little of the power of the Cross. But 
Christ did not come to make people religious; 
He came and He spoke to very religious people— 


284 A MISSIONARY MODEL 


to intensely religious Jews. So Paul also bega 
with them in each town. But what both Chris 
and Paul came to do was to make religious pe opl 
Christian, to put them in love with the Cross 


to humble them at it and raise them forgiver 


A missionary is a man who lives on the Cross 
and for it. Secluded from the control of & 
Church, he lives the nearer to Christ and t 
more on the Cross. 

Is it hopeless to expect an interest in mission: 
with the public mind at fever heat on thi 
war?* Nothing is more contrary to the m s 
sionary idea than war. But then if a war i 


that we have this position: We may be intensely 
preoccupied in such a service of God, though it 
is at the same time in fatal contradiction 
that order to evangelise which was Christ's las 
word and the Cross’s real appeal to the Christia 
world. What is the answer to this riddle? 
am not saying whether the present is a jus 
war or not. I am only asking you to keep 
asking yourselves the riddle. It is because w 
* Preached during the Boer War. - 


; 


| 


bs 


A MISSIONARY MODEL 285 


do not pursue moral riddles that our moral 
sense is not keener and wiser than it is. To 


pursue such questioning would open a great 
many matters on which our religion should 
give an answer. I am only asking how it is 
that it is so easy to rouse the war passion of a 
Christian nation and so hard to stir missionary 
ardour? It is all that political statesmen can 
do to keep Europe at peace, and it is more 
than Christian statesmen can do to rouse 
Europe to a love of peace; and great sections 
of the Church are keener about a war than 
ever they were about the spread of their faith. 
I am not saying there is no answer to such 


questions. I am only saying that if we took 


a pencil and set down plainly all the answers 
that real thinking could supply upon them, we 
should have done a great deal to clear our 
mind, to open our views of things sacred and 
secular, and to startle ourselves out of an 
ignoble content. 

To one feature I would especially call atten- 
tion. Hundreds and thousands of men—young 
men—have recently been roused to volunteer 
their service and imperil their life, not for gain 
but for patriotism or for adventure. There must 
be a huge mass of people who are sick to death 
of the humdrumness of life, its stifling respect- 


286 A MISSIONARY MODEL 


ability, and its lack of opportunity; and man 
of them have snatched at this chance of getti n; 
out of it. It is a stirring sight to see th on 
go. It causes excitement (of various kinds) 
and in excitement thought is quickened. A né 
in the crowd of thoughts there is one that look: 
in and I select it for mention here: it is 
contrast between the appeal of Christ for men 
to go abroad and the appeal of country. W 
see what the war appeal can do. Our national 
spirit is alive and can produce sacrifice—it may 
be of life itself. I turn to the missiona: J 
society. What is its complaint? It cannot ge 
men. Its appeal does not touch the young men 
vehemently, and when it does it is not always 
the right class. It should have men to pick a t 
choose from. It can get money more easily 
than men. The Christianity of this nation 
has only reached this stage—that country is é 
stronger appeal than Christ, the national than 
the Spiiapl We are only in the bs ies stag 


It is easy to fire the heather, but not to a 
bearers for the fiery Cross. The number is few, 
comparatively, to whom the Cross comes as ¢ 
fire, the evangelical Cross. There are ma ny, 
I admit, to whom Christianity is a religion of 
doing good in an agreeable way, in an interes i 


A MISSIONARY MODEL 287 


‘ing way, in a spiritual way, but it is not with 
‘them a power which sends men out to a life 
of isolation and hardship. It does not develop 
responsibility and devotion of that order, but 
rather a pleasant piety, which must be humoured 
and interested before it will do anything, and 
which only aims at giving people higher in- 
terests, and not a total change, a new Master, 
and a new loyalty. 

Are there none among the young men who 
may be here, unsettled perhaps about a career, 
to whom this life of sacrifice, obedience, and 
mute hardship appeals. I am not going to 
use rhetoric or dwell (as it would be easy 
to do) on missionary romance. I am speaking 
of a life from which the glamour will soon 
go when it is immersed in lonely work. I am 
speaking of the kind of life that has a spell 
only for the morally brave, and that needs 
courage of a kind which does not go with the 
beating of drums or trumpet appeals. You 
whose course is indefinite, but who wish to 
take your religion seriously and to give your 
life for Christ, is there anything that attracts 
you in this call for missionary men? I am 
not speaking to the excitable and egoistic 
person who is always waiting for his seniors 
to take notice of him and patronise him, and 


288 A MISSIONARY MODEL 


speaking of, or to, the ordinary young egoist 
who keeps boring Churches with questions, 
“What are you doing fer me?” instead of 
coming and saying, “ You are in a great wo kK, 
What can I do for you?” There is anoth or 
way of treating those selfish youths. I am 
speaking on the chance that there might be 


a quiet, brave spirit of inward force and faith 


° 


looking round for a sphere, and on the chance 
that this high, severe vocation might reach him 
as the call of Christ. Is there anybody who 
feels called to go and work and wait years for 
a convert for Christ's sake? You might not 
have to do that, but that is the missionar y 
stuff. It is not for everybody, only for one 
here and there. He might be here, and this 
message might find him. | | 


th 
e 
ett, 
ae) Oy 
eg 
Wy 
: ] 
ay \ ANZ 
Dy ea ee 
A - 
wy ’ 


‘Son of man, can these bones live ? 
... Ye shall know when I have oc 
EZEKIEL xxxvii. 3-13. 


Sell 


HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE* 


ZEKIEL differs from the other prophets 
in this, that he stands before us as half- 
prophet and half-priest. He has been described 
by a great authority as “a priest in a prophet’s 
mantle.” In him the two streams met and 
parted. Prophetism ended in Ezekiel the pro- 
phet, and the hierarchy began in Ezekiel the 
priest. His prophetic inspiration helped to set 
the relics of Israel on their feet; but his priestly 
sympathies began that organisation of the in- 
spiration which made the nation a Church, and 
tied it at a short tether where it stood. The 
Judaism which he started on its career tended 
to kill the faith in which he began it. 

In this passage, however, “Uzekiel is no priest, 
but pure prophet, and even in the great pro- 
phetic line. 

We are, perhaps, in a position to trace the 
growth of this famous parable, and reconstruct 
the process by which it arose in the prophet’s 


* Preached to the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society. 
291 


(Fe) “Fe 
“on 
a ‘ Fup . 


hb ol 
I 


292 HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 


thought. It was built from a hint. He took 
fire from a spark, and that spark seems to haye 
been a phrase he heard among his fellow-exiles’ 
in Babylon. It is quoted in verse 11: “Our 
bones are dried up, our hope is lost.” The re- 
mark fell into his mind and the word took " 
wings in his genius. They gave him a bone, 
and he made a bird, like the great naturalist. — 
The metaphor swelled in his imagination to a 
vision, and it became one of the great dreams 
of the world, which is so much more than a ; 
dream, because its inspiration is the sloeplasg | 
purpose of God. 

The prophet stands up amid lassitude andl 
indifference, and he is a prophet because he is 
a man of hope. In dark days he did not 
despair of the State. He had hope for the 
people. And it was because he had faith in its 
God. “Not for your sakes do I do this, but for 
my own name's sake which ye have profaned 
among the heathen.” : 

What we have here is an allegory of resur- — 
rection. But it is the resurrection not of the — 
body, nor of the soul as individual, but of the A 
nation. The resurrection of the individual dead — 
was no part as yet of the Hebrew faith. This 
is shown here by the prophet’s answer to the 
question, “ Can these bones live?” “TI know | 


HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 293 


not, Thou knowest,” he said. If the resur- 
rection of the dead had been a current belief, 
or the prophet’s belief, he would have said, 
“Yea, Lord.” But he took the unlikeliest, most 
incredible thing they knew to illustrate the 
grandeur of what God would do. The people 
were as hopeless of the future as they were of 
the dead rising. The point of the vision is lost 
if we suppose a current belief in the resurrec- 
tion of the dead, or any intention of the prophet 
to teach it. ‘God will do a thing as incredible 
in its way as you and I know the raising of the 
dead to be.” 

It is originally, then, an allegory of spiritual 
resurrection. But of spiritual resurrection in 
national or public form. 

1. So, at the outset, note that it is only spiritual 
resurrection that can revive a sunk nation. To 
move a herd of slaves to their native soil would 
not be to re-establish a nation. Every sound 
Zionism needs a Moses, an Ezekiel, a prophet 
of exile, more than a financier. The mere 
restoration of a part of the captives to Judea 
would not have made the work of Ezra and 
Nehemiah possible without a national spirit of 
faith. It is the faith and the prophets of God 
that chiefly make national life, not national 
commerce or arms, and not organisation. In 


294 HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 


oe) 
Bo 


some Welsh counties the judges on circuit have 


without national religion—which is the chief 
thing that suffers from a national Church. 

2. Conversely, the resurrection of souls to. 
spiritual life can only have its full effect, sooner 
or later, in national life. It has been the error 
of many Christians to overlook this, to think 


duty, public spirit, the civic temper, the social 
mind, and the universal conscience. The cross © 
becomes actual only in a kingdom of God. The 
Church may have no direct duty in polities, but 
its members have. It is the constant tendency - 


history of the Salvation Army. i 

But let us consider the passage in more detail. 
We have—I. Toe Scene. II. THe Acrion. . 
Ill. THE REsvtt. | 


I. THE SCENE. 


It was the scene of so many visions, the 
valley by the river Chebar. Now it wore a 


wy 
4 


hideous face. It seemed a valley of desolation. 
It was a vast charnel-house. A skeleton army 
to Ezekiel’s vision lay there, ghastly, not with 
the fresh horror of festering corruption, but 
with the gaunt squalor of dry ruin. The plain 
was white with the chronic leprosy of death. 
And it was the chill of old death, death grown 
grey and sere, death itself turned dead, because 
it was death with its beauty dead, its pathos 
dead, death not redolent of life just gone, but 
long hopeless of any life to come; it was death 
long settled down into dismal possession, death 
established, privileged, throned and secure. 

That meant Israel—defeated, wasted, and 
strewn by the heathen. Its old soul was ex- 
tinct, its old hopes were gone. Its sacred laws 
were like limbs dismembered and parched. 
Israel was crumbling into the deadly soil of a 
paganism which had slain faith. They were 
left to die the second death, some not hoping, 
some not wishing, to revive (chap. xxxvi. 23). 

The vision would stand for any people whose 
soul is extinct. It would stand for any class or 
section of any people who are treated as aliens, 
whether they are deported or not, who are cut 
off from interest in their native soil, oppressed 
till energy is dead and faith is dried up; whose 
hope no more sings, but has only a hard rattle 


HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 295 


guarantee against death. No mere numbe g 
can outvote death. He does not fear the big 


battalions. He has bigger battalions than all 
who live. Already the dead are “the majority " 
of the race. All the armies and parliaments 
of the living cannot disestablish death. No 
numbers can; but only the faith and power and j 
person of an endless life. t 
And the many bones were very dry. The 
deadness of a dead community is a deeper 
death than that of so many scattered souls. A 
city of the dead is more dead than the same 
mortality dispersed would be. City vice is 
deadlier than rural vice. A community of 
gamblers like Monte Carlo is more dead than 3 
the same gamblers spread here and there. 
Nests of iniquity are more iniquitous than the 
scattered crime of the same number. So pull 
down the nests and make the rooks flee ; scatter 
Alsatias ; erase the slums. Spread the hotbeds — 
out on the land, and destroy the ferment of 
corruption. B 
The death of a great multitude is very dead. 
But when it lives, the life of a great multitude — 


HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 297 


f is great and high. It may be an army that no 
man can number, the very city of God. 


Il. THE ACTION. 
Tue Respect oF FAITH FOR HUMAN WRECKS. 


1. The prophet passed by them round about. 
He does not go through them. He does not 
tread on them, as a lout in a cemetery steps 
upon the graves. They had been trodden 
enough. The spirit of God moved in him. His 
God had been the God of these bones also. 
Therefore he is respectful to them, reverent to 
them. The spirit of God does make us reverent 
to human wrecks, black or white. Faith alone, 
with its power of life, has the true reverence 
for death. When a woman gathered for burial 
the mutilated and detested remains of the 
Emperor Nero, “the pagan world, it is said, 
surmised she must have been a Christian; only 
a Christian would have been likely to conceive 
so chivalrous a devotion towards wretchedness.” 
And the preacher of the Lord has no right to 
treat otherwise than respectfully the dry bones 
he confronts in the worldlings about him— 
faithfully but respectfully. Abuse is not Divine 
judgment. And who with a right heart would 


298 HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 
treat otherwise than respectfully the dis ne 
herited in any nation, the dispossessed 
deadened, the serfs of our civilisation, whose 
hope is worn to the bone, and their life-joy 
wasted to a skeleton? Whoever does otherwise — 
does it from a low heart. The social insole: n b 
is a moral fool—a philosophic expert, perhaps. . 
but an ethical dunce. And he is often himself 
a parvenu. Man fallen and dead is yet an 
object of some respect to his brother. For 
what is he to his God? Can these bones live? 
Well, at least, they are relics; they are no 
mere remnants, mere things. They are thin oS 


with memories, things with tears in them, 
things once wedded to life though now in tragic 
divorce. They are things that appeal to lov es 
and memories in the living God Himself, whose 
love gave them life. They are bones, not stones. 
A very mummy of a man, lying beneath th 
wrath and curse of God, may yet not be th 
victim of God’s neglect. The hardened hear 
has the distinction still of God’s anger, and i 
so far it has some of His promise. And is H s 
anger not His love inverted? Is it beyond His 
pity or foreign to His grace? It was those 
under ‘His wrath that He was moved in Hi 
love and pity to redeem. To have the ange 
of God is at least some melancholy distinctiox 


HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 299 


it is one that stocks and stones have not, nor 
the orbits of the heavens, nor the cold infinities 
of space. Nor could they have it though aught 
went wrong. You are still within His patience 
if you can stir His wrath. You may be shut 
out from His society, but not from His atten- 
tion. You are still in His thoughts; you are 
not banished to His neglect. We cannot be 
wounded by those who are beneath our notice. 
For anger there must be some parity of nature, 
some affinity of being. We are only angry 
with what we could love, with what attracts 
our antagonism and fascinates our dislike. And 
it is some glory, some greatness, if we are still 
that which God might love, even though we 
may not believe He does. If He cares enough 
for us to be angry, He cares enough to redeem. 
Things unworthy of His wrath are outside His 
redemption. You are not beyond the pale of 
God’s grace if you are still the object of His 
wrath. It is still a grace of God if we bear 
His judgments. The wrath of God which 
banishes us from His presence still keeps us in 
His memory. It is not the last hell with us 
till we are let utterly alone. If the heathen 
are under the wrath of God they have some 
claim on our respect, to say nothing of pity and 
love. 


300 HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 


CRITICISM AND ITS ACTION ON THE D&BRIsS 0 
THE Past. . 


2. “Son of man, can these bones live?” Th 
question to the prophet is put anew to hi 
posterity every time we renew the past. ] 


future? Has past knowledge or action a 
power to enlarge and correct itself? Or is 
the past dumb and done with, dead and dry 
‘Son of man, can these bones live?” 


asking us by the mouth of historic criti isn 
to-day. The valley of time in the light o 


and proved historic errors. And Scripture is 
like the very cockpit of the valley, where tl 1e 
battle has been most severe, and where, tc 
many godly eyes, the slaughter has been 
severest and the desolation most sore. They 
seem to see nothing left but bones bereft of 
life. They are unsure whether the preciou: 
past can survive the critics. I would bid them 
take heart. Fear not, only believe. Believe 
in the God of fact and the God of faith. I 
sure of this especially. Faith is essential 
sound criticism. It is the past quality and the 


HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 301 


present power of the Revelation which enable 
us to distinguish between true and false in its 
associations. It was the selective power of 
faith that enabled the Church to first make a 
eritical canon of Scripture. It is an ill-informed 
error to suppose that the first centuries of the 
Church were totally uncritical. For the Bible 
men, remember also, the miracles themselves 
were to be judged by their moral and spiritual 
import discerned by faith (Deut. xiii. 1-3 ; Matt. 
xxix. 24), It is faith that carries the miracles, 
not the miracles faith. The great miracle of 
Christ's resurrection neither came nor comes 
to the world, but to men already disciples of 
His person. Its value is not for a world of 
jurymen, but for a Church of believers. Faith 
is essential to just criticism. Unfaith is unfair 
and uncritical. It is only by the critical and 
self-corrective action of faith that we have any 
reformations in Christianity, whether Luther's 
or our own. And this is true for the Bible as 
for the Church. It is only by this side of the 
Spirit's action that the Bible becomes for the 
Church the authority it always is. 

We may have been trusting too much to the 
corruptible flesh of changing creeds. Let us 
invoke and stir up the Spirit of God. It was 
a too proud flesh, perhaps, that had come to 


302 HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 


clothe these sacred bones in the Church’s ca 
a flesh too established, indolent, and unspiri ual 
At the Reformation, for instance, some ze 
the systems that had grown up to cover th 
historic facts needed the invader with his | 
critics blade and his destroying skill. To the 
prophets, the fierce Assyrian and proud Baby 
lonian who assailed a too rank Israel were stil 
the servants of the Lord. But the bones are 
there—the facts—and the Prophet of prophets, 
the Saviour, stands over them; and the Spirii 
of God is there. We have what the first century 
had even when it buried Christ. We have On¢ 
who cannot be holden of death. And we haye 
the Church’s faith. God would be able of these 
bones to raise up children to Abraham—from 
these facts to make believers in Christ. y 
these gospels that have done so much 


But ae fix and radiate for ever the saving 
revelation of God as an historic revelation and 
a revelation in power. The Spirit of God is a 
spirit of history; and without faith history is 
not only not great, but it is not intelligible. 
The true historic spirit is always of the Spirit 
of God, and history in God’s hands cures the 
wounds that history makes. Let us not give 


2 
bee 


the gospel’s case away by taking it for granted 
that critical methods must only have destruc- 
tive results. Faith, I repeat, is an essential 
condition of sound criticism. It was to faith 
that the first facts came—to the Church, not 
to the world. Is the Church to wait on the 
world’s permission to believe? History at once 
scientific and spiritual will cure both the diseases 
of old history, and the surgical wounds made 
by critical history to-day. The unity of the 
Redeemer’s gospel will lead us to the true sense 
of the Redeemer’s person; and that will give us 
the true unity of Scripture. The history that 
constructs will take the tool from the hand of 
history that destroys. Critics’ swords will turn 
to ploughshares, and their spears to pruning 
hooks. What threatened the life of the old 
faith will be found but to have trimmed it for 
more fruit. You say some of the very bones 


HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 303 


have been taken away, and you know not where 
they have laid them. They were not bones, 
perhaps, but callosities, excrescences. They 
were bound to decay on free exposure to the 
air. Criticism has not burned the bones, what- 
ever a few critics have done. It has but gathered 
and reverently arranged them. It is the Spirit’s 
work, this putting bone back to bone. Nay, it 
reclothes them with their first young flesh. 


304 HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 


The Spirit of God is acting afresh on 
historic facts on which we have been forced 
afresh. The very bones, were we left with them, 
would be more than remnants. They are holy 
and potent relics. They are not the mei : 


faith. They are not only clothed with memories, 
but instinct with power. There is virtue in 
them, and miracle. They have life and healing 
in the touch of them. Did He not say He came 


for many for the remission of sins? “Think 
not that I came to destroy the law or 
prophets: I came not to destroy, but to fulfil.” 
“Come unto Me, all ye that labour and aré 
heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” “Follow 
Me.” “Every one who shall confess Me before 
men, him shall the Son of Man also confess 
before the angels of God.” “No one knoweth 
. the Son, save the Father ; neither doth any know 
the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever 
the Son willeth to reveal Him.” From bones, 
relics like these, His own account of His own 
Cross, could we not, with His Spirit, rebuild our 
Jerusalem if the need arose? It is the gospel 


i] 


HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 305 


that must save the Church and its beliefs—yea, 
even the Bible. It is not these that save the 
gospel. The historic Cross is saving us from 
much in the historic Church. The historic 
gospel saved everything at the Reformation. 
It saved the Church from itself, and it must go 
on doing so. We must not come to the gospel 
with the permission of the critics, but to 
criticism in the power of the Gospel. Faith 
does not wait upon criticism, but it is an 
essential condition of it. The complete critic 
is not a mere inquirer, but a believer. It was 
to believers, and not to critics, I repeat, that the 
things appealed which are criticised most, like 
the Resurrection. Critical energy is only just 
and true in the hands of a Church whose heart 
is full of evangelical faith. The passion of an 
apostolic missionary faith is an essential con- 
dition to a scientific criticism both sound and 
safe. By sound I do not mean sound to the 
confessions, but to the mind. And by safe I do 
not mean safe for the Church, but safe for the 
soul. I mean that faith in the gospel, evan- 
gelical faith, is essential for that view of the 
whole case upon which sound results are based. 
It is essential in order to be fair to all the 
phenomena. It must enter in not to decide 
whether we accept proved results, but to decide 
Missions 21 


not only an asset which criticism must ineluc 
in its audit; it is an organ that criticism m 
use. The eye cannot say to the ear, “I haven 
need of thee.” 


“And God has a few of us whom He whispers in the ear 
The rest may reason, and welcome; ’tis we musicians know. 


have opened your graves.” The man who wa 
struck down on the way to Damascus hag 
very essential evidence about Him who was 
raised up at Jerusalem. The faith of Pente 08 
makes a great difference as to the Easter creed 
It is by Christ within us that we can take fu 


Christ, the judge of all; and His chief evider 
is Himself. So also the history of the R 
One in the experience of the Church thes 


HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 307 


Experience verifies the Gospel. History comes 
in aid of history. My history makes strange 
things credible in the history of long ago. 
And the history of those who see the Lord 
to-day is as real an experience, as real evi- 
dence, as the experience of Paul. It is cer- 
tainly as real as the impressions of the scholar 
who only reads acutely the Gospel narratives. 
The Spirit that quickens the facts is as real 
an experience as the intelligence that sees 
them. The faith that felt what the bones 
could be was as real to the case as the eyesight 
which saw them on the plain; and it was at 
least as relevant to the result. 


THE FUTURE THAT RE-REVEALS GRACE. 


The history of the future, indeed, can have 
no new revelation. The Christ that is to be 
is the Christ that has been, is now, and ever shall 
be, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. 
There is nothing conceivable beyond the Salva- 
tion and Saviour that we have. But the future 
will re-reveal the revelation fixed in the history 
of the past. It will elicit its infinite resource. 
If history was God’s first channel of revelation, 
then by the way of history, from social needs 
and deeds, will come the revelation of the 
revelation—its unfolding, its finding of us 


308 HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 


modern men. The students of history must 
work with the makers of history. Not or ly 
the study of past history, but the path of 
future history is the way of God’s Spirit in t] 
deep. And not personal history alone, t 
public too. It is the nations and not the 


and there the history of the past, but will 
enlarge by new races the Christianity of 
future; it may re-read the history of the 
Church, but it will re-discover the Bible’s ex- 


affairs the life of Christ Himself. And are 
we not always realising afresh His death? 


key to time. From age to age God ai 
the pessimists and revives the bones by miracles 
of historic resurrection. aa 

God takes the man of little faith, takes h 4 
like Ezekiel, carries him back in spirit throu ch 
history to the Dark Ages of Europe. He plants 


HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 309 


him by the side of a Church with its faith 
dried and its enterprise dulled into mere ortho- 
doxy beneath the pagan empire. He carries 
you and sets you in the valley of the Dark 
Ages, when the Spanish Moors had more light 
and life than the Christians of Europe. He asks 
you, Can these bones live? You cannot say. 
But God’s answer is the wonderful eleventh, 
twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. The past 
was not dead. The Church as the habitation 
of the Spirit is never without its recuperative 
power. As the body of Christ it must rise, 
and cannot be holden of death, however long 
the torpor be. The Church has never really 
been Christ’s tomb, but His Holy Land, where 
He both slept and waked, died and rose again. 

Or again. He takes you onward and sets 
you in another dismal valley, the Church of 
the Borgias and Medicis, among the parched 
bones of faith, when the previous revival had 
shrunk to a mere renaissance, and when the 
paganism was not in the Empire, but in the 
Church’s own heart and head. He points you 
to the wicked Church of all the cultures, at 
Rome, in the valley of the fifteenth century, 
when the faithful had all but ceased to believe. 
Can such bones live? You see not how. God’s 
answer is, “Arise, ye more than dead.” His 


310 HOLY CHRISTIAN E} 


answer is Luther, Calvin, and sixteenth century 
the discovery of St. Paul, the coronatio 
faith, the vitalising of Europe, Puritanism 
birth of democracy, the rise of Constitu 
alism, Free Churchism, and the dawn of mod ern 
times. The past was not dead. 


THE REVIVAL IN MODERN MISSIONS. 


Church of last century, with Deism without 
and drought within—drought, but no thirst 
Can that thing live? And God’s own ansy 
is Wesley and the Evangelical revival, New 
and the Oxford revival, and much more t 


HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 311 


‘dismal valley of the eighteenth century, but 
their souls stood upon Pisgah, and they saw 
the promised land, and all things delivered 
unto Christ of the Father. They had imperial 
minds, but they had also holy methods—two 
things that we have severed. They saw the 
bones stirred and clothed, and men trooping 
from their living graves at the call of the 
Spirit alone. They saw races roused, rescued, 
civilised by the gospel. Nay, they saw more. 
They saw the Church itself converted to mis- 
sions, a bony Church quickened, fleshed, and 
marshalled anew. They saw that the Church 
must be re-converted if it was to survive. 
But they also saw it would be, because in them 
the revival had begun, they were themselves 
of the Church, they were the firstfruits of 
the Spirit that makes the Church, and they 
felt the first flutter of His breath. And the 
Church did need this conversion. There was 
not among the heathen more contemptuous 
opposition to missions than these men met in 
the Church at home. It was not the Church 
that made Modern Missions, but certain apostles 
in it—as it was in the beginning and ever shall 
be. The Church may make saints, but it is al- 
ways apostles that make the Church. When we 
speak of the great effect of the Church on the 


312 HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 


heathen we should not forget the great blessing 
of the heathen to the Church. The receiv ing 
of them has been to the Church itself life from 
the dead. The Church has more faith in i 
own gospel because of its proved power abroad. 
It is more sure of its own word. And it fe ols 
it to be not only a true word and a mighty, 
but a more genial and pitiful word. The old 
word is incarnate anew. The old bones live 
in a humaner life. Every missionary, then, is 
preaching to the Church that sent him no less 
than to the Churches he founds. When we 
speak of the action of grace, do not forget the 
reaction of grace, the force of its recoil. Deey 
calleth unto deep. The gospel’s word to the 
world includes also its echo to the Church, 
Missions are an integral part of the Church’s 
life, and a source of new life to it. And the 
missionaries are prophets that call flesh upon 
our bones. They are not hobby riders th at 
the Church patronises, but organs, agents, and 
deputies of the Church itself. They do not 
act with us, but for us. They are the long 
arms of the Church, and its limbs by which 
it covers the breadth of the world. The man to 
whom missions are a fanatic fad, and not his own 
concern, has yet to learn the soul of the Christian bi 
gospel and the secret of the Church’s life. r 


~ 


HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 313 


It is upon the universalism of Missions that 
our Church’s own foundations rest. We live 
upon the Word we give. It is always a 
tendency of the Church, and a temptation, to 
conquer a certain region and then settle in on 
it, to turn self-contained, and to seclude itself 
from humanity in a side valley. It becomes 
a sect, or a mere national Church. It forgets 
that the Church is humanity in the germ, and 
that its health is in its human range. And 
then it becomes inhuman, it becomes sceptical 
about humanity, and finally sceptical about its 
own gospel, and credulous in the same propor- 
tion of its own rites. For to limit the gospel 
is, in the end, to deny the gospel. It is from 
this that Missions save us. They force us to 
realise that the gospel is for man, and man 
for the gospel, that the Church has the world 
for its parish. Nothing teaches us like Missions 
that English Christianity must have more than 
an English gospel, that the travelling patriot 
is the worst evangelist. The foundation of the 
British Church was a mission from a Church 
more universal. It was a spirit from abroad 
that stirred our pagan bones. We are not 
Jewish converts; we are heathen Christians. 
I do not mean that we are Christian heathen, 
but that we owe our Christian selves to an 


314 HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE Se 


ancient mission to the Gentiles. Where should 
we have been without Paul, Boniface, Augustine, 
Columba, and a host more who turned from the 
Church palpable to the Church possible ? 


rose among ourselves to continue the t 
apostolic succession; for that continuity is 
nothing else than the inextinguishable mis- 
sionary energy of the gospel. It is th o 
missionary that is the truest counterpart of 
the apostle to-day. No, the past is not dead 
while we keep that succession up, nor is th S 
present. For whatever the Churches are that 
they should not be, and whatever they are not 
that they should be, at least they are not dead. 
They are neither corpses, nor are they mummies 
—whatever some of their members are. And 
some of these are a great problem. a 


THE PREACHER’S TASK OF SPIRITUALISING 
CHURCH. 

Some members of the Church make a greater 

problem than men of the world. They make 

us ask, in more despair than the world itse 


i 


HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 315 


stirs, Can these bones live? These people go 
to church, uphold their Church, and would 
fight for their Church; they would make civil 
war for its privilege. They have more fight 
than faith in them. Their souls are exceedingly 
filled with contempt. And they have a name 
of lusty life. But they are spiritually dead; 
and they care for their Church but as partisans, 
or because it is a centre of social rank, or of 
juvenile amusements. 

What preacher but is cast into occasional 
despair by that question as he looks upon many 
spiritual skeletons around him? What preacher 
has not many a time to answer with Ezekiel 
that these can only live by some miracle of 
God? He, poor son of man, has failed and is 
hopeless. He preaches out of duty more than 
inspiration. He often prophesies in obedience 
rather than in hope. Well, preach hope till 
you have hope; and then preach it because 
you have it. “Prophesy over these bones. 
Call out to the Spirit,” says the Lord. At the 
Lord’s call, if not at your own impulse, call. 
Call with a faith of life when the sense of life 
is low. Speak the word you are bidden, and 
wait for the word you shall feel. And then 
the issue is the Lord’s, and you win a new 
confidence in self-despair. 


316 HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 


But it is not with bones or mummies that th e 
preacher has mostly to do. It is with those 
lusty Churchmen, those vigorous religionists. 
He comes, let us say, and he lifts a vital voice, 
He is a man of parts and force. He collec is 
a following. He is the centre of an interesting 
congregation. It looks well, comfortable. 
is no skeleton crowd. It has flesh and blood. ia 
What is lacking? The things not revealed af 
flesh and blood. The unearthly lustre in th @ 
eye, and movement in the mien, and taste in 
the soul—the spirit of life. It is a congregation, 
not a Church; it is not dry, but also not 
inspired; it is cultured, not kindled. The Spirit 


4 


x 
5 


has not come to abide. There is not among 
them the shout of a king. id 
So far it is only education, culture, that the 
preacher plies. It is mere religion, not r - 
generation. The bones are clothed, but no to 
quickened. They know about sacred thin 
about helpful things; they do not know th oy 
Holy Ghost. 
THE POWER OF THE GOSPEL AND THE ENERG@ 7 
OF PRAYER. 
3. So prophesy once more, Son of man, sai a} 
the Lord. Prophesy to the Spirit of Life. 
Preach, but still more pray. Invoke th - 


HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 317 


abiding Spirit to enter these easy forms. 
They are less dismal than they were, but 
still too dull. Court for their sake the Spirit, 
and cultivate the discernment of the Spirit. 
Amid the many airs that fan them, and the 
crowd of vivacious interests that tickle them 
and pass, make the Spirit of a new life blow 
on them. Above every other influence woo 
and wait upon the Spirit. Trace and press 
the Spirit of God. In every providence seize 
the Divine grace. Subdue the spirit of the age 
to the Spirit of Christ. Set up among the 
judicious critics the judge of all the earth. 
Preach the Spirit which not only clothes the 
skeletons decently and comfortably, but sets 
them on their feet in the Kingdom of God. 
Preach what casts down imaginations and high 
things to the obedience of Christ. Proclaim 
the Spirit which turns mere vitality into true 
life, mere comfort into the mighty peace. Turn 
your worldly skeletons by all means to a living 
congregation, but above all turn your congrega- 
tion into a living Church. And how shall you 
do that if your appeals to men have not been 
preceded by your cry to the Holy Ghost, if 
your action on them is not inspired by your 
wrestling with God? Only then can you turn 
a crowd into a people, and a people into a 


and your multitude into a spiritual phalanx. 


Prophesy no more to the bones, preach 
more as if it were dead worldlings you ha a“ 


Spirit in man. Preach as to those who hail 
begun to live and seek life. Never mind current 
literature. Mind the deep things of God. 
Preach to them great things. Let the trivial 


Church interest. We may only coax while we 
think we save. We may, we do, load our 
preachers with meetings till they are dull to 
the Spirit and strange to their own soul. 


selves. Preach character by all means. Preadl : 
it more than has been done, but do it through 


out of your hands. Preach the Lord’s Supper 
more offen and the tea-meeting less, as the 
Church’s social centre and family hearth. Do 
not preach about goodness less, but about gra ce 


HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 319 


more. Do not preach self-denial, preach a cross 
that compels self-denial. Do not preach against 
selfishness, preach the eternal life that sub- 
merges self. Do not mistake fervours and 
ardours for the Holy Ghost. Do not take the 
flush for the blood or the blood for the life. It 
is insight we want more than ardour and power 
and zeal. Bring to men the Spirit and prophesy 
to the Spirit in them. Bring to them great 
demands. Calluptheirmoralreserves. It is the 
demands of life that make men of us. Tax 
them. Ask of them great sacrifices. We grow 
up as we lay down. “What, sacrifice before 
faith?” youask. No, first the sacrifice which is 
faith. There is no such tax on self-will as faith, 
no such sacrifice of our self-satisfaction as true 
faith, faith of the great kind, faith which is a 
cross as well as trusts a cross and a resurrection 
too. Trouble them, trouble them with the stir 
of a higher life. Living water is always 
troubled. It is the angel’s trace upon the pool. 
Leave them not at ease. Do not stop with 
putting on the flesh that just saves them from 
being skeletons. Infuse the flesh with spirit. 
Propose a great task, a thing incredible, and 
keep it before them till they rise to it. 

Some are in their graves, it is true, but the 
flesh has begun to come upon them though 


320 HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 


the Spirit has not yet come which makes them 
rise. They have at least the organs and the 
instincts of the spiritual life. They are not 


have some heart. But that is all. They have 
not passed beyond heartiness, geniality, lusti- 
ness. . They are not beyond human nature and — 
its sympathies yet. They care for vitality, 
energy, something going on, more than they ; 
do for the gospel in itself as yet. Or they are 
fascinated by a new world of culture, the | 
clever books, the extension lectures, the last 
poem. Or they are full of Christian charity — 
and empty of Christian truth and careless of © 
Christian fact. Well, these promising vivid — 
souls have to be stirred also. Rouse them to 
the secret of redemption, to the sacrifices of the 
Spirit, to a life beyond life, and a culture 
beyond culture; to faith that begins with — 
repentance and love that grows out of faith. ; 
Rouse them to great things, impossible to flesh ] 
and blood however pious. Wake the oblations ‘ 
and obediences of faith. Call to the Spirit to 
come and seize them and to do for them and ~ 
to do with them what your call to them can- 
not do. q 

Oh! my brethren, does the Spirit not make — 
demands on us which no preacher, no pleader, 7 


F, 3 
Me HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 321 


can venture to do? Does something in our 
own soul, as he prophesies, not stir us, rebuke 
us, exact from us more than he dare? All the 
movements that the true prophets stir escape 
beyond their dreams or demands. If they do 
not, the seer has prophesied to us, perhaps, and 
maybe for our good, but he has not prophesied 
to the Spirit. He has not made the Spirit hear 
the call, and brought Him to sting us to our 
feet, and to urge us to move, and to force us 
to give, and to make us do miracles that 
surprise ourselves. He has not yet made the 
Spirit hear his call if he do not exact from us, 
and gladly get, what he would personally shrink 
to ask. 


THE MORE SPIRITUAL OUR GOSPEL IS THE 
MORE MISSIONARY IT IS. 


And on this missionary occasion I will confess 
that—wonderful as the record is—I should not 
be able always to retain my own faith in 
Missions if I went merely by the reports and 
palpable results from the mission field. I could 
not, unless they prophesied to the Spirit in me, 
unless they appealed to faith in the gospel, 
more than faith in missions and missionaries. 
This is the real basis of missionary interest and 
action. It is our own experience of the gospel, 

Missions 22 


ees r 


322 HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE ran 


and not our acquaintance with the field. Fo 
missionary methods you must know the fie d 
that is the affair of the missionary statesman 


the gospel, and know it in the Spirit. 
you must prize it so much that you must ¢ 
it away ; hs must not desta it so money 


it is to this Spirit they prophesy when the, 
really stir us, and give us stay. The mission ary 
passion is PrOReTuenats to the evangelical 


spite of travellers, traders, newspapers, anc 
politicians. . 
So, then, when the results of missions fail 


= 
eh 


us we fall back upon our own experience of 
the gospel. But if that fail us? When the 
objective results fall short, can faith live upon 
a subjective experience which has its season 5; 
and may flush or pale? Is not the first necessity 
for faith an objective? Are there no hours in 
the experience even of the best and boldest 
when the vision fades, the fine gold dims, and 
the glorious hour grows grey? Have we no 


HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 323 


times of dereliction and seasons when the 
brook runs dry that we drank of by the way 
and lifted up our head? Are there no times 
of lassitude, distraction, and other preoccupations 
in the Church at large? If results do not 
come in, and the confidence of hope goes out, 
what then? 
Then! Then is the greatest hour! 


“Night it must be ere Friedlands’ star shall beam.” 


It was on an hour of dereliction that the whole 
world’s fate hung and its Saviour saved to 
the uttermost. When feeling slips we anchor 
on fact. Failing the results we see, and the 
experience we feel, we stand on a faith in 
which we know. When owr experience wanes 
we turn to the experience of Christ and His 
apostles. Christ’s faith in His own work stands 
when our faith in it wavers. When it is hard 
to believe, we believe in His belief. We turn to 
Christ's sense of His own sure lordship of the 
world, Christ's faith in His own Cross. We hear 
the command of Him who knew the power 
and range of His own victory, and we discern 
the missionary necessity, beyond all specific 
command, in the very nature and grace of the 
gospel itself. 


324 HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE | 


And so I draw near to my third e 
Christ’s redemption carries with it the revers: 


the spiritual certainty which masters the wo! la 
and it gives the moral principle of its s afe 


promise of the world that now is. 


III. THE RESULT. 


The principles which are latent here ar 
briefly these. The true, profound, and fin 
insight into things is by spiritual resurrection. 
Lordship comes by knowledge, but this kn 
ledge is by revival We know what mt 
certainly rule the earth by knowing for certain 
what has changed us. This is the source, for 
men or nations, of true conquest and fin 
dominion of the world. For empire goes 
last not with ardour but with insight. Empi 


i 


HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 325 


follows the Cross. The power and method 
of the world’s final conquest is a power of 
which we know nothing till we are saved men. 
We cannot use that power till we share its life 
and experience its control. The final dominion 
on earth can only be on the principle of the 
missionary gospel. Let it be boldly said: 
Redemption is the condition of Empire. 
Dominion goes to conscience—to morality. 
And there is but one morality at last, and 
its source and principle is the Cross. The world 
is to be ruled in the end only by those men 
and by that society that know the laws and 
powers of the moral soul. You cannot know 
God, and God’s way with the world, unless 
you give your whole manhood as the price. 
But to do that is to die and rise with Christ. 
To command the world you must die, and 
you must rise with more command of your 
soul than when you died. You must come 
out of the grave of your dead self with the 
power of God. This is the moral truth of 
all Divine dominion, personal or collective 
private or public. “ When ye possess the land, 


and thy son asketh thee what mean these 


statutes and judgments, thou shalt say, We 
were bondsmen, and the Lord brought us out 
of Egypt with a mighty hand.” It is the 


t 


} 


‘ 


326 HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE» " 


redeemed, the humbled, that inbierde . 
earth. | 
The spiritual power makes its own procedt oa 


and manages its own machinery. Inspiration 
is the true principle of organisation. The soe 
fabric must grow out of the spiritual fact, a 
the social form reflect the central social power. 
The Church is but self-organised inspiration 3 
its form is given by the nature of its truth— 
by its gospel. And the forms of human society 
also must finally take their shape from the 
need, the life, the redeemed destiny of th e 
human soul. 1 


MODERN ORGANISATION AND ITS ANTIDOTE. 


Let me dwell on these principles thus briefly 
premised. I suppose there never was a tim e 
in the history of the world when organisation 
went for so much, for good or ill, as it does: 
to-day. Societies have been called into 
existence for all manner of purposes, till they . 
oust the home and threaten to submerge even 
the Church. Science is organised both into 
philosophies and into great industries. Philan- 4 
thropy is organised as a serious business. 7 
nels themselves organise and sianiek: ie 


HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 327 


are conducted by societies which are in them- 
selves small states. Politics and parties are 
in the hands of wire-pullers. And death is 
organised as well as life. Drink is organised 
into a solid, selfish interest, anti-social, anti- 
national, and anti-human. Armies were never 
such perfect and costly machines, and wars 
‘were never to scientific. The bloodless war 
of industry is entering on a phase of trusts 
and syndicates, when vast organisations 
threaten so extinguish private enterprise 
altogether. The commercial swallows up the 
national. The fieriest patriotism vanishes 
when we can sell on excellent terms to a rival 
race. It is the newest Catholicism, the latest 
ultramontanism—that of finance. Labour also 
is organised, no less than Capital, in a way 
that seems at times to threaten both the life 
and the conscience of industry. Civilisation 
altogether becomes organised, by wire, and 
rail, and Press, into a concert which is not 
always in tune, but is still in action. 

But there is no danger in this passionate rush 
to the mechanical side of existence? As we 
perfect the form, what is to become of the 
spirit? Can we organise human nature, and 
land this leviathan with a hook? Can we 
organise ourselves into eternal life, or thus 


328 HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE © 


power to manage? Have we not more sk 7 : 
and education than we know what to . 
with? If we have but organisation to lea 
on, and but trusts to trust, what is our fut 


should we do when it is soul that is requis 
of us? How are we to work this load “ 
machinery and carry this steel mail? | 


of its own shell? Where are we to find cell 
increase of life which is to save our organisation t 4 
from becoming our grave? If the new organ- — 
isation spread without new life, what does that — 
mean but relapse, servitude, and suffocation ? ¢ 
We die pot-bound. We may multiply the — 
people, but if we do not increase the vital joy 
what is to save us from an outbreak of 
anarchism which shall pull the new fabric | i 
about its ears and perish in the wreck? The } ‘a 
mere national spirit cannot save the nations. q 4 
Human nature cannot secure its own liberty ~ 
against a skilful conspiracy of intellect, will, i 
and money which appeals to its own lusts. — 


HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 329 


Have we no source of new life, no treasury 
of moral power, no spring of moral initiative, 
no surety for our spiritual freedom, no security 
against the tyrants that bribe us, and find 
too ready allies in our own greeds and passions ? 
If organisation grow, there must grow also a 
new volume of life. Because this life is our 
final safety, it is our first need. Where is it 
to come from? “Ye shall know,” said the 


_ Lord, “when I have brought you out of your 
_ graves.” The efficiency of the world must be 


t 


carried by a sufficiency of the Spirit; its 
machinery must be worked by new Divine 
power. Empire must obey inspiration. The 
last great battle of the West must be won by 
a spiritual power. The worldly spirit cannot 
hold the world. Our increase of resources must 
be controlled by an increase of faith, by that 
permanent enhancement of man which faith 
alone brings. Economic adventure must be 


balanced by spiritual courage and enterprise. 


Christ must rise in us more than we rise to 
the hour. The energy of our advance must 
be ruled by the power and purpose of His 
resurrection. It is power we need to manage 
power. Power! It is not high spirit but 
Holy Spirit. It is moral insight and spiritual 
courage. It is courage and resource to confront 


330 HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 


*, 


the problems and perils that do not oce aT 


whelm us if we saw and knew ourselves as 
we are read by the high and holy eyes tha t 
inhabit Eternity. It is power to confront the 


and it is because he is worldly and defies the 
holy gods. What troubles and threatens us 
most is not the pathlessness of a dark wor a, 
but misgiving about our own self, disenchant- 
ment with our schemes, and despair of our ; 
own fidelity. What we need is the kind of 
power that will enable us to go on and sti ite 
conquer when our robust assurance fails, when 
we have gone through the disillusionment which 
comes from exhausting the world we range, 
from neglecting our conscience, or betrayi ng 
it, and then finding ourselves out. It is 
depressing enough to be found out, but it is. 
crushing to find ourselves out. Is there no 
spirit to find and save us in that hour where — 
we have hidden ourselves away among the 


ff “rans. 


HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 331 


stuff? If there be none, if we have no such 
Discoverer, Redeemer, Quickener, we have 
no God, no kingdom, no courage, no future. 
It is in His Redemption that we must find 
our last power to master life, and our supreme 
ethic to rule the world. Not all the pushing 
premiers of the time can secure our place 
if we are too energetic to wait upon the Lord, 
too impatient to stay and be saved, and too 
self-sure to tolerate the Cross. It is in God’s 
forgiveness that we find the humility that 
has the promise of freedom and the imperial 
secret. It is in His Cross that we find the 
ethics that inherit the earth. The future of 
the world is theirs who have the secret of the 
moral world. When He has brought us from 
our graves, then we shall know how heaven’s 
missions are spread, worlds are won, and stable 
empires made. To the good, easy Briton who 
keeps his goodness in one pocket and his politics 
in another what I say must seem nothing but 
fantastic. Yet with all the apostles, and before 
every Festus, it must be said. The secret of 
Christ is the final empire of the world. The 
missionary Gospel is the only imperial principle 
in permanence. How can we master where we 
do not know? It is man we want to master, 
and life. And we only know life, man, and 


332 HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 


the moral world in the Cross. We only know 
them when we do much more than know, whe ni 
we trust, and when we experience their moral 
salvation. The world was made for the Cross. ‘ 
We ride out all the storms of history, and 1 
have the reversion of all policy because we are, 
and in so far as we are, saved. We conquer 
fate because we are so much more than 
conquerors—we are redeemed. The hero who 
remains hero stands upon the saint. The 
nation that survives is the nation of the just. 
And any final heroism of man, any beneficent 
valour or greatness, is due to the redeeming — 
holiness of God. It is the breath of a Spirit 
which quickens and masters, because it is a 
holy Spirit, and works in a holy way. * 


NATIONAL IDEALISM AND THE KINGDOM OF 
Gop. 


Patriotism and its devotion are things that 
worthily lay hold on our imagination. They are 
great virtues andfine. But they are not by them- : i 


selves things whereby a soul lives, or a peopl i: 


source is the principle of the Cross. And by thatl a 
I mean something not only beyond fair play and a 


HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 333 


sacrifices it can rouse. It is possible to combine 
with much toil and large sacrifice a total lack of 
moral quality or Christian faith. It is possible 
to combine with a life devoted to vast patriotic 
visions conduct released from moral scruples. 
Napoleon's order of greatness was as unscrupu- 
lous as it was large ; it was red with ruin, and 
it cursed a whole people with visions of glory 
which quenched the passion of duty and debased 
the public soul to the Second Empire and its 
sequels. Our ideals and sacrifices, however 
large or public, must be inspired and con- 
trolled by ends in themselves moral and Divine. 
The devotions of empire have all something 
stagey about them, unless they are suffused by 
the principles of the Kingdom of God. All the 
glories of the mere natural man run out to a 
final unreality when they are set forth on a uni- 
versal scale. The Kingdom of God is the only 
universal society, and every nation or Church 
is doomed to shipwreck which will not accept its 
place there. Neither affections nor virtues exist 
for themselves. But our ethics to-day are suffer- 
ing from the literary and religious glorification 
of love for its own sake, and the idea of sacrifice 
is becoming debased by an esthetic idolatry 
of mere sacrifice and mere bravery. Both the 
love and the sacrifice hear so much about 


334 HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 


themselves that they grow self-conscious. They 
“fancy themselves.” They dress for the public 
and count on the Press. How nauseous are the 
ideals of love or sacrifice that nourish the 
young Briton of both sexes in the sixpenny 
magazine ! They are not set in a moral atmo- 
sphere and a holy end. They are cut off from 
faith. Before I admire sacrifice, or any ardour, 
I wish to know its object, its inspiration, its 
methods. What brought a world from its grave 
was not the ideals of Christ, not Messianic visions, | 
nor self-sacrifice for them. Christ’s victory 
came by refusing some of these grandiose visions — 
for those of secret, severe, and holy obedience 
to the Holy law. It was by His hallowing once ~ 
and always, in the world’s most vast, public, and 
decisive act, God’s Holy but dishallowed Name. 
Every State is chiefly saved by those in 
it who worship an unpopular God. It is not 
ideals that save, nor guesses; not dreams, : 
sacrifices, nor genius—but sanctity. I do feel—we :, 
all feel—the spell of huge personalities, forceful, — 
captivating, and imaginative. But I feel their 
limits still more. The man of blood and iron 
was bewildered and beaten by the spiritual — 
power of Rome. The Armada was broken 
upon a people it despised. Cromwell himself, — 
by forcing even freedom, ran the hilt of his — 


HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 335 


_ matchless sword into his own mighty and 
making hand, and he gave his work by its 
military success the sentence of premature 
collapse. The most’ colossal personality 
succumbs to death; but death itself has 
succumbed to a personality more than colossal 
in Christ. It is more than colossal not because 
more forceful, but because He was more of 
a power, more eternal as the Holy One and 
the Just. The mightiest personality in history 
is the Holy One. He is the first, and He will 
be the last. The greatest power we know is 
holiness—the most quick and piercing, the 
most subtle, pervasive, and permanent. The 
Holy Christ is the chief of the great Powers 
of Europe to-day. It is not from Him that 
holiness has become for the world a negative 
idea, cloistered and feeble. The first care to 
Christ was not that He should sacrifice Himself 
for an ideal ; it was that He should practically 
and historically glorify the holiness of God 
as the most real of earthly affairs. He died 
to bless man, but still more to glorify God. 
And upon His people, the first charge in Church 
or State must always be, not the happiness 
of men, but the holiness of God. The Christian 
man’s chief end is to glorify a Holy God in 
all things, public and private. Our aspirations 


336 HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 


must follow our prayers; our public dreams 
must follow our most common prayer, which 
always begins, “ Hallowed be Thy Name, Thy 
Holiness be made real, as in heaven’s affairs so 
in earth’s.”. When the Church can make that 
note practical in human things, then the Church 
will call the peoples from their graves. She 
will set up realms based on something more 
blessed and permanent, something more 
missionary, than the egoisms and rivalries of 
race. 

It already means much that in the present 
war so many of our people on both sides have 
sought justification beyond England’s rights 
in England’s duty to the righteous purpose of 
God for the world. Our very divisions have 
that new and ennobling feature. (I wish to say 
this lest I might be charged with the indecency 
of passing any partisan judgment here on 
current affairs.) Generosity and sacrifice can 
silence many tongues, and stir much praise, 
but are we not all convinced that it is public 
righteousness that exalteth a nation, and 
holiness that hallows sacrifice? How can we 
prosper if we are moving about in a world 
not realised? And the world is not realised 
till we find its moral soul. And God has 
revealed, nay re-created, that in the moral trans- 


HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 337 


action of the Cross, God and His kingdom are 


for many of the mighty potsherds of earth 
but an even chance; and their prancing 
schemes for history fall and break their neck 
because they put their foot into the little 
mole-hill of this “ perhaps.” 

The knowledge that makes long history and 
holds the far future is the knowledge of a 
kingdom-making, nation-waking God, righteous 
even to holiness, and holy enough to redeem 
us from our moral graves. In a word, it is 
the missionary idea, the missionary faith, and 
the missionary policy that has the key of 
Empire and the long, last reversion of the 
wide world’s future. If the Christian Church 
go to the heathen with one word, and the 
Christian State with another, for what can 
we hope? There is no sure future to godless 
dreams, godless commerce, yea, or even to 
godless ardour for the just and free. It is 
possible to spread even justice and freedom 
by ways which civilise at first, but debase at 
last, and which exploit the world far faster 
than they can save it. The missionary spirit 
is the spirit which brings men and nations 
out of their graves through a holy resurrection, 
and a resurrection unto godliness. Do you tell 
me this is a preacher’s extravagance? Nay, 

Missions 23 


338 HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 


it is apostolic penetration and boldness. Tf 
is not mine. I do but paraphrase the New 
Testament. It is the possession of that book 
that makes the schism and malaise in our 
public soul and our impetuous civilisation. It 
is from there that a spirit issues which arrests, 
astonishes, and troubles us in the night. Atany 
rate, it is there, at that faith, that the great 
audacities of the missionary passion are fed. 
And I confess to you that I see more that is 
grand, sure, and practical in the visions of an 
original missionary pioneer than in those of the 
greatest empire-builders. I think more of the 
dreams of Carey than of Clive. Clive was, 
indeed, a great man, and he attracts the 
national imagination; but the least in the 
Kingdom of Heaven was greater than he, 
The violent may take, but it is the meek that 
inherit and the just that keep. The spirit 
which possesses the earth, and keeps possession, j 
is inspired at the Folly of the Cross. . 


THE IRONY OF THE KINGDOM. 


“The weakness of the Cross!” From far 
beyond these walls I can hear the scorner say, 
“Tt is the greatest decadence in history, and can 
become the most unctuous.” And this voice of ; 
Nietsche finds an echo in the secret heart and 


: 
5 


HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 339 


practical conduct of many a spirit less bold. 
The greatest decadence! It is the sublimest 
irony of history. So quiet, so awful; so absurd, 
so irresistible. It mocks the wisdom of the wise 
and the valour of the brave. The terrible ones 
are brought to nought. It is as mighty as 
the heavens, that see all things, and outlive 
them, and still smile subtly, securely on. The 
weakness of the Cross is the greatest pitfall on 
earth ; and it mocks the empire-makers as it 
establishes its power upon their wreck, and 
thrusts its fine spells through the crevices of 
their untempered walls. 

This is all very ridiculous, of course, but they 
laugh best who laugh last. One sits eternal in 
heaven and laughs. I think I do measure with 
some adequacy the power of paganism at home 
and abroad. And it does seem very ridiculous, I 
admit, to think of the conversion of the races 
of the East to Christ, or of the peoples of 
Europe to the principles of the gospel. It is 
as ridiculous as Christ before Pilate, as ironical 
as the Judge of all the earth sentenced by a 
forgotten Sanhedrim. Oh, I know that ridicule 
and folly. I know it for the very power and 
irony of God. If you ask me whether these 
wrecks and relics of conscience in Europe or 
elsewhere can live, I must frankly say “I do 


340 HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 


I do not eve it from any induction, but i "a 
believe it—I am sure of it.” And I am ae 
because I know this :— 4 

1, First, I know that God has made life out of ; 
my shipwreck. That is my experience. He has ; 
opened my grave and made me-ive. He has 
clothed my bones with flesh, and stirred me 
with life and hope. And if He has done that 
for me, then the incredible miracle is : 


principle done that saves the world. 

2. For the second thing I know is this, that, 
according to the mind of Christ, and the experi- 4 
ence of His apostles in every age, I have only 
been saved by something which, in the same 
act, also saved the world. It took a world’s 
salvation to save me; and what I know in 
this matter for me I foreknow for mankind. : 
My salvation has the prophetic spirit of a 
world’s redemption. The prophetic spirit is 
not knowing the future, but knowing Him 
who does. Missions depend not on a foresight © 
of the Church’s triumph, but on an insight 
into the Gospel’s purpose and power. We see 
not yet all things subdued, but we see Jesus. : 
I am saved by the Cross and Resurrection of | 
One who was not one, but all mankind's 


HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 341 


epitome, promise, and surety. This I know, 
namely, “O Lord, Thou knowest.” If I do 
not know the world’s future and its possi- 
bilities, God knows. 

3. And this God has told and moved me 
how to act. He has told me to treat every 
man as saveable; therefore every man is save- 
able. And He has commanded and inspired 
His Church to act as if from these wrecks 
of men He could by His breath make armies 
of the Lord. Therefore, by faith I know they 
ean be so made. He has made man’s possi- 
bilities to be the Church’s opportunity, and 
man’s need the Church’s duty—nay, its safety. 
If I refuse His Word I derange my own soul. 
I can only go on to my own salvation if I 
recognise that God in saving me has charged 
Himself with the salvation of my kind, and 
put some of the responsibility on me. Our 
missions cast us upon the fundamental right 
and faith of the Church itself. The charter 
of both is the same. To lose faith in man 
under God is, in due time, to lose faith also 
in a God over man. 

But it should not be so hard to believe in 
a missionary future if there were not some- 
thing wrong with our Christian present ; nor 
to believe for the dark races if we were more 


342 HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 


sound about the white. We are straitened in 
ourselves. We are still in our graves, buried 
alive. And when the trouble is lack of power, — 
what is there to do but pray? We are alive — 
enough surely to believe in prayer. 4 


LET us PRAY. 

O Lord, bid us come forth. We are in our ~ 
graves. Lord, raise us up! We are bound e 
in grave-clothes ; loose us and let us go. We 
are tied up in our habits, our views, our — 
pursuits, our prejudices, our egotisms, our 


politics, our interests, our fears, our passions, — 


our fashions, our friends, our sects, our creeds. ~ 
And our life is stale, our bones are dry, and 4 
we are weary, our little souls are easily weary — 
of so great a world. It presses on us like a 
weight and frost of earth. All we often seem 
able to do is to turn in our coffin. Lord, . 
Lord, open unto us! Open our graves, clothe 
our bones with flesh, and inspire our flesh ~ 
with freedom by Thy Spirit. Thou hast given 
to us for our deepest passion the passion to 
be free, because we are made in Thy image, 
and Thine own deepest passion is the passion 
to redeem us and set us free. Raise us from 
the dead. Set us on our feet. Put us back 
in our own land. This is not our own land. 


SS a 2 oh ee 


HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 343 


We are exiles, and we are too content. We 
are secluded, buried, and very dry, in a valley 
out of the way. Bring us forth into the great 
traffic of the Kingdom. There is our native 
land. Lord of life, we can only live in Thee. 
Thou art our native land. Restore us to Thee. 
We can know Thee only by sharing Thy life, 
and win Thy world only by sharing Thy victory. 
Breathe into us Thy breath. Lift us with 
Thy viewless Spirit. We faint, we fail, we 
die; we lie, we parch, we bleach upon the 
valley of battle where Thy enemies prevail 
and the fowls of heaven pick us bare. Do 
Thou clothe our bones, quicken our flesh, kindle 
our powers, and create us anew. And the 
valley of death shall be a gate of hope, and 
because we have fallen we shall rise to a 
humbler life and move to a holier land. 

O Christ, Redeemer of the world, Thou Open 
Door and Thou Living Way, Thou certainty of 
truth and assurance of salvation; by the open 
mystery of Thy Holy Incarnation, by Thy 
Cross and Passion, by Thy precious death and 
burial, and by the coming of Thy kingdom, 
have mercy on those who are dead and buried 
here. 

By Thy glorious Resurrection and Ascension, 
and by the coming of the Holy Ghost, good 


344 HOLY CHRISTIAN EMPIRE 


deliver our souls into their native land. 


of our self-concern. Break the seal of our 
satisfied slumber and the delusion of our pros- — 


Lord, open our graves, enlarge our hearts, and 4 

_ 
Give us our brethren for a care and the 

heathen for our desire. Roll away the stone 


perous dreams. Fulfil with the fulness of the — 
heathen the fulness of our salvation. We are 
not what we might be to Thee because they 
are not what they should be to us. Lord, lay 


them on our heart. On Thy heart we have all 


lain, and so Thou wast our Saviour. Bring us — 


into the fulness of knowledge and strength of ; 


salvation through the risen might, grace, and 
glory of Jesus Christ our Lord. 


UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON. 


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